If I'm understanding you correctly, you're describing citation analysis
(sometimes referred to as a part of bibliometrics). It is mostly applied to
article data (e.g, the web of science / web of knowledge at ISI) but there
are zillions of studies looking at co-citation and co-authorship networks,
the long tail of cited works and authors, etc. You can hardly shake a stick
at JASIS&T without hitting two or three of these studies.

As you're probably already thinking, getting a hold of the citation
information in a machine-readable format is the painful part. Things are
made harder by your desire to work with books, since many citation are to
individual chapters for edited works, and (of course) books just plain
aren't generally available digitally.

Article searches (in google scholar or your local academic library) for
"bibliometrics" or "citation analysis" should get you started on past and
future work.

On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 12:47 PM, Joe Hourcle <[log in to unmask]
> wrote:

> On Nov 17, 2011, at 12:09 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>
> > Matt Amory wrote:
> >> Is anyone involved with, or does anyone know of any project to extract
> and
> >> aggregate bibliography data from individual works to produce some kind
> of
> >> "most-cited" authors list across a collection?
>  Local/Network/Digital/OCLC
> >> or historic?
> >>
> >> Sorry to be vague, but I'm trying to get my head around whether this is
> a
> >> tired old idea or worth pursuing...
> >>
> >>
> > Sounds like you're describing citeseer - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/- it's a combination bibliographic and citation index for computer science
> literature.  It includes a good degree of citation analysis.  Incredibly
> useful tool.
>
>
> Another recent project (that I haven't had a chance to play with yet) is
> Total Impact :
>
>        http://total-impact.org/about.php
>
> It's from some of the folks in altmetrics, who are trying to find better
> bibliometrics for measuring value:
>
>        http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/
>
> I don't see a list of what they're scraping I think they're using the
> publisher's indexes, PubMed and other databases rather than parsing the
> text themselves ... but the software's available, if you wanted to take a
> look.  Or you could just ask Heather or Jason, they're both approachable
> and always eager to talk, when I've run into them at meetings.
>
> I also seem to remember someone at the DataCite meeting this summer who
> was involved in a project to parse references in papers ... unfortunately,
> I don't have that notebook here to check ... but I *think* it was John
> Kunze.  (and I don't think it was part of the person's presentation, but
> something that I had picked up in the Q/A part)
>
> -Joe
>



-- 
Bill Dueber
Library Systems Programmer
University of Michigan Library