Cascading citation expansion

Digital Science's Dimensions is envisaged as a next-generation research and discovery platform for more efficient access to cross-referenced scholarly publications, grants, patents, and clinical trials. As a new addition to the growing open citation resources, it offers opportunities that may benefit a wide variety of stakeholders of scientific publications, from researchers and policy makers to the general public. In this article, we explore and demonstrate some of the practical potentials in terms of cascading citation expansions. Given a set of publications, the cascading citation expansion process can be iteratively applied to a set of articles so as to extend the coverage to more and more relevant articles through citation links. Although the conceptual origin can be traced back to Garfield's citation indexing, it has been largely limited, until recently, to the few who have unrestricted access to a citation database that is large enough to sustain such iterative expansions. Building on the open application program interface of Dimensions, we integrate cascading citation expansion functions in CiteSpace and demonstrate how one may benefit from these new capabilities. In conclusion, cascading citation expansion has the potential to improve our understanding of the structure and dynamics of scientific knowledge.