Although I had previously said I wouldn’t mess about trying to map the relationships between papers, well… it’s hard for techi fingers to resist. Created this little java program to convert the bibtext into a DOT format file which can be parsed by the tools in GraphViz to produce a nice ‘map’ of the papers. At the moment you need to add into a “refs” field the bibtext key of the papers that are referenced. Which isn’t as irksome as it sounds because part of a reading a paper is looking at the references and ticking off the ones that are recognised. Just type them in as you go and the jobs is done. A next step would be to use sites such as http://www.scopus.com/ to try and get the references automatically and then trying to match up those with papers already in your won bibliography. If everyone used an API and tagged things consistently, for example using DOI, it wouldn’t be too bad. But they don’t. So lots of text parsing and matching, which I’ll leave for another time.