Finding Relevant Academic Papers with Cocitations [CoCites Tool]

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Finding relevant articles
Finding Relevant Academic Papers with Cocitations.

In this article, we will show you how to find relevant academic papers with cocitations. We will use the CoCites ( beta version), a state-of-the-art literature search tool for that purpose.

CoCites is developed by Dr. A. Cecile J.W. Janssens, research professor at the Rollins School of Public Health of Emory University, USA.

Finding relevant papers on a specific topic is not an easy task from a plethora of papers. CoCites tool lets you search the scientific article on a specific topic quickly. In our earlier post, we wrote an article on how to find and explore academic research papers using a visual tool.

If you want to learn how to search relevant scientific literature instantly then you are in the right place. As it lets you find specific high-quality scholarly resources in a very short time. This tool plays a pivotal role during the literature review.

Besides, this tool allows you to find similar academic research papers during systematic reviews or meta-analysis. It discovers scientific research papers on the same particular topic based on input papers rather than keywords.

After finding articles, it gives out a ranking of most frequently Co-cited articles. The data source of this software is the NIH Open Citation Collection (NIH-OCC), public access, broad coverage resources.

In this section, we will show you how CoCites works with PubMed and Google Scholar.

Finding Relevant Academic Papers with Cocitations Using PubMed

Follow the steps below to search the similar articles on specific topic using PubMed.

Step #1: Download and Install Free CoCites ( Beta) Extension

First, you open the site for installing the plugin for the Chrome browser. You can also use the Firefox browser for the same purpose. At the time of this writing, it supports only Chrome and Firefox browsers. Once you open the site, this window will appear.

Add CoCites Beta to Chrome for searching relevant articles with cocitations
Add CoCites (Beta) Plugin to Chrome

To install CoCites, you click on the “Add to Chrome” button. Once you click the button you will see the following window.

Adding CoCites beta Plugin
Add CoCites (Beta)

Once you install the browser extension, the tool is ready for use. CoCites can read the information on the site through your google chrome browser.

Step #2: Open PubMed

Now, open the PubMed using any one of the following links:

I. PubMed Link-1

II. PubMed Link-2

After opening the PubMed, we enter the following research paper:

“Prediction of protein subcellular localization by incorporating multiobjective PSO-based feature subset selection into the general form of Chou’s PseAAC”

Below is the snapshot of the PubMed window:

 Input Research Paper in PubMed Window for searching
PubMed Interface

Step #3: List of Co-cited Articles

CoCites adds a one-click button in PubMed to display frequently co-cited articles. A mouse-click presents the list of articles that are frequently cited together with your selected article. Once you click on the “Search” button, this window will appear.

List of Co-cited Articles for finding relevant articles using Cocites Tool
List of Co-cited Articles

If you want to back to PubMed then click on the title. A click on “Times Cited” performs a co-citation search for the newly selected article.

Step #4: Register and Export

Now, you register to export all articles that are co-cited more than once. Once you complete the registration process, you click on the ” Export XLS” button to download the file.

Export XLS File of relevant academic research papers
Export XLS File

No registration is required if you don’t want to export the search result.

Below is the snapshot of the Excerpt of the XLS file.

Excerpt of Export File after finding cocited articles
Excerpt of the Export File

Finding Relevant Academic Papers with Cocitation Using Google Scholar

Follow the below steps to find the relevant research articles in Google Scholar using CoCites tool.

Step #1 Download and Install Free CoCites ( Beta) Extension

We are going to use the same method that we used in step-1 above for Pubmed. So, here we are not discussing the installation process.

Step #2: Open Google Scholar for Finding Research Articles

You can find review articles on Google Scholar. At the very outset, you just open the Google Scholar. After opening the site, you just input the research paper of your interest.

Here, we select and input the following paper:

“Prediction of protein subcellular localization by incorporating multiobjective PSO-based feature subset selection into the general form of Chou’s PseAAC”

You should see Google Scholar window like this:

input research article in Google Scholar Interface
Google Scholar Interface

Once you click the search button the following interface will come along with its cocitations.

View Co-citations using google Scholar for finding relevant articles
View Co-citations

The plugin adds CoCites buttons to articles in Google Scholar. The articles are sorted by cocitation frequency. The grey “View Co-citations” button implies that articles are not found in the cocitation database.

This tool uses citations of input papers rather than references. It uses cocitations of last 100 cited papers of input paper.

After completing step-1 and 2, you just follow the above mentioned steps (3 and 4) for the rest of the work.

In this short tutorial, we discuss how to find relevant academic research papers with cocitations using the CoCites tool. We have used the beta version of this tool. You can get articles on a specific topic quickly.

It is one of the best co-citation based tools for searching scientific article. If the input paper has few or even no citations then it will not act properly.

According to the CoCites website’s information, they are going to launch its full version along with the following features in near future.

  • Perform a co-citation search using multiple query articles
  • Find recently published articles through a citation search
  • Filter search results using a similarity score
  • Save search queries for re-use and search updates
  • Inclusion of Safari browser

Cocites is now available for Safari web Browser (Updated on 23rd Novemeber, 2020). In order to download the browser extension visit this site. You can also go to the app store for same purpose.

Go to this link for more information- Link

Hopefully this blog post was useful to you! What other tools have you used for the same purpose ?

We would love to hear and learn from you. Please feel free to comment below.

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