How to use CoCites — the basics
A radically different search method
The default method to searching scientific literature is entering keywords in a literature database. The quality and relevance of the keywords determines the quality and relevance of the results. Entering several best-guess keywords will return relevant articles, but they are likely not all there is and may not be a ‘representative’ selection. Researchers who don’t want to miss any relevant studies write extensive search queries for multiple literature databases that may catch all relevant articles and many others. Our preferred strategy is rather inefficient.
CoCites searches the scientific literature radically differently. The tool finds related articles using co-citations. The start of the search isn’t a set of keywords, but a set of one or more articles that is exactly what the search should find more of.
The co-citations are the articles that are cited together with any of the articles in the query set, by experts on the topic. A co-citation search can only find articles that are cited and falls short on find articles with few citations and newly published articles. As these articles themselves cite multiple articles on the same…
