Exploring scholarly papers through citations

Bibliographies are fundamental components of academic papers and both the scientific research and its evaluation are fundamentally organized around the correct examination and classification of scientific bibliographies. Currently, most digital libraries publish bibliographic information about their content for free, and many include the citations (outgoing and in some cases even incoming) to the papers they manage. Unfortunately no sophistication is spent for these lists: monolithic pieces of text where it is even difficult to tell automatically the authors, the title and publication details, and where users are provided with no mechanisms to filter and access full context of each citation. For instance, there is no way to know in which sentence a work was cited (the citation context) and why (the citation function). In this paper we introduce a novel environment for navigating, filtering and making sense of citations. The interface, called BEX, exploits data freely available in a Link Open Dataset about scholarly papers; end-user testing proved its efficacy and usability.