Co-cited author maps as interfaces to digital libraries: designing Pathfinder Networks in the humanities

Using data from the Arts and Humanities Citation Index for 1988-1997, we are attempting to generate co-cited author maps in real time that can serve as interfaces for document retrieval. Our novel approach is to start the maps by entering the name of a single author. Our system obtains a rank-ordered list of the other authors who are most often co-cited with the input name (e.g., the top 50) and then systematically pairs these other authors in turn to obtain their co-citation counts. The resulting matrix can be passed to a mapping program which groups the authors meaningfully to show the structure of the field implied by the input author´s name. At present we are experimenting with Pathfinder Networks (PFNETs) as the mapping program, and show a PFNET for 25 authors in hermeneutics, a major field of the humanities. The documents co-citing the mapped authors are candidates for retrieval. We discuss desirable features and design considerations in retrieval interfaces based on PFNETs