Explore research literature visually!

Stephanie Marshall
Bibliographic Software Specialist

Are you swamped by references when you do a literature search? How do you identify what’s relevant? New RefViz, also from the company behind EndNote, ProCite, and Reference Manager, is a fascinating tool designed to provide users with a powerful way to explore reference literature visually. RefViz analyses large numbers of references by thematic content and presents an overview of the main topics discussed in the reference set.

RefViz creates overviews of literature search results from popular databases such as ISI Web of Science, OCLC, and PubMed; or bibliographic management software-EndNote, ProCite and Reference Manager. It essentially groups the literature the same way you would stack papers. Two visualisations are provided to review the literature: the ‘galaxy’ and the ‘matrix’.

Used together with EndNote, ProCite, or Reference Manager, RefViz provides an additional level of analysis to existing reference collections and lets users find the most relevant citations for their papers.

As you might imagine, this is the type of software which really has to be used to be fully understood. The RefViz trial version is a fully-functional 30-day version which includes documentation to get you started. Take a look at http://www.adeptscience.co.uk/go?pg=AA503.