Trailblazing through a Knowledge Space of Science: Forward Citation Expansion in CiteSeer

Understanding emerging trends and patterns in science and technology is essential not only to scientists and engineers in their own fast-advancing fields but also to a wide variety of individuals and organizations who are also interested in tracking the development of thematic topics. This is a challenging task because many existing tools are not particularly designed to deal with the dynamics of intellectual structures that transcend the boundaries of individual documents or isolated topics. In this article, we introduce a conceptual and operational platform that extends the traditional notion of traveling along individual citation pathways and defines operators for recursive and holistic theme expansion based on citation connectivity. We describe the implementation of a forward expansion operator and illustrate its potential with the CiteSeer metadata. In addition, we integrate the forward expansion operators with information visualization techniques.