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A new software package that helps researchers, librarians, and administrators analyze and visualize bibliographies is now available. HistCite® extends the utility of a bibliography far beyond its use as a reading list, by enabling the user to obtain various views of a topic’s structure, history, and key events.

Bibliometric analysis
Bibliometric analysis is the use of the bibliographic information (titles, authors, dates, author addresses, references, etc. that describe published items) to measure and otherwise study various aspects of a specific field of scholarly endeavor. Typical bibliometric questions that can be answered by HistCite include:

• How much literature has been published in this field? When and in what countries has it been published? What countries are the major contributors to this field? What are the languages most frequently used by the items published in this field?
• What journals cover the literature of the field? Which are the most important?
• Who are the key authors in this field? What institutions do these authors represent?
• Which articles are the most important?
• How have the various contributors to the field influenced each other?

Historiographs
Information visualization is the transformation of non-numerical data into a graphic format, to help researchers and scholars understand large collections of information. Although there are numerous uses for information visualization, HistCite performs one specific application: it converts bibliographies into historiographs.

A historiograph is a time-based network diagram of the papers in a bibliography and their citation relationships to each other. In a historiograph, each paper in the bibliography is represented by a symbol selected by the user. The symbols are arranged over a timeline of the publication dates of the papers and connected by lines that represent the citation relationships. By changing the time frame of the analysis, the resulting historiograph can form a snapshot of a specific period or an in-depth look at the total history of a subject. Once a historiograph is created for a bibliography, it is easier to see and understand the subject’s key publication events, their chronology, and their relative influence.

Historiographs can provide an invaluable starting point for those who need to write the history of a subject area – sociologists and science historians can use them to complement the subjective aspects of their work with objective data. The ability of historiographs to quickly and easily aggregate and visualize large amounts of data can help students overcome their initial inertia when starting to write doctoral dissertations. Authors of review articles can use historiographs to quickly pinpoint the key developments in their chosen topic.

Previously, bibliometric analyses and visualization of a bibliography, especially a large one, could only be accomplished (if at all) through onerous, repetitive clerical work. HistCite makes it possible for individual researchers to do this work quickly and with minimum help from support staff.

HistCite’s origins
Eugene Garfield, Ph.D., president of HistCite Software LLC, is the program’s inventor. Garfield is well known as the inventor of Current Contents®, Science Citation Index®, Index Chemicus® and other innovative information retrieval tools. He is also the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (now part of Thomson Reuters). According to Garfield, he has "always sought to develop tools that increase knowledge and communication by reducing information overload. HistCite continues in this vein." He stresses that HistCite "is not just another program for formatting reference lists – it is a powerful analytical tool. In much the same way that a spreadsheet program allows you to better understand financial situations, HistCite lets you better understand the structure and history of a scientific or scholarly subject."

Using HistCite
To use HistCite, a literature search must first be conducted through Web of Science. The results are then imported into HistCite where the analytical and visualization work takes place under the direction of the user.

HistCite is intended to be useful in a wide variety of professional pursuits:

• Authors who wish to write review papers will find HistCite helps them gain new insights into the development and current structure of a subject
• Educators can use tables and charts created with HistCite to better explain a subject to students.
• For professionals who need to publish, it can significantly reduce the effort of authorship
• Authors, publishers, and journal editors wishing to know the role their publication plays in a given subject area can use HistCite for that purpose
• Science journalists can gain quick knowledge of a subject upon receiving new assignments
• Librarians who do searches for clients can provide added value by applying HistCite to their results.

The bibliography the user feeds to HistCite represents the literature of the subject area as it is defined by that user’s unique perspective. So the analyses and visualizations produced by HistCite from that bibliography are one-of-a-kind, allowing better focus on specific areas than possible before.

Alexander Grimwade, Ph.D., chief operating officer of HistCite Software, claims that "the applications for HistCite are limited only by one's imagination. It simplifies the analyses and organization of search output so that researchers will be more willing to construct 'what if' scenarios that can lead to a new understanding of a subject."

Access to HistCite
HistCite sells for USD199 for the base program, with discounts for quantity purchases. Updates are provided free during the first year of use. HistCite is delivered via download of a fully functional 30-day free trial package. The trial software can be converted to a licensed version via the Web site or by contacting HistCite Software via e-mail or phone. There is a money-back guarantee of satisfaction.

Compatible with most personal computers running Windows, HistCite itself has minimal hardware requirements, but very large data sets will require commensurate hard disk and memory space.

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