The Paper Drill

This project focuses on a prototype for “chaining” (Ellis and Oldman 2005), which is the process of beginning with an exemplary article, then finding the articles that it cites, the articles they cite, and so on until the reader begins to get a feel for the terrain.

The chaining strategy is of particular utility for scholars working in new areas, either through doing background work for interdisciplinary interests or else by pursuing a subtopic in a domain that generates a paper storm of publications every year. In our prototype project, we have produced a prototype system that accepts a seed article, tunnels through a number of levels of citation, and generates a summary report listing the most frequent authors and articles.