Mapping connections between topics covered in academic papers - does such a tool exist?

Question

I'm interested in learning about how to go about writing a paper, and obviously, an integral part of this process will be to read papers written by others, and study those. I'm curious about the idea of using software mapping tools as a means of logging connections between certain papers of interest.

The following questions: Is there a network map of subjects and how they connect with each other? and Map (tree) of citations/references are related to my question, but I'm not sure the suggested software, Auto Desk or Cytoscape, would be entirely appropriate for what I'm interested in doing.

Does anyone have any other suggestions?

Answer 1

ScienceWISE is one of the attempts:

The ScienceWISE project aims to develop a scientist-generated on-line knowledge base fully integrated into the physics ArXiv.org

The ScienceWISE system allows scientists, in the course of their daily work to

1. dynamically generate professional-field-specific ontologies: add concepts and logical relations between them; provide expertly-written, community-ranked definition articles and links to other existing resources;
2. to create an interactive semantic environment, annotating scientific research papers, uploaded to ArXiv.org, and linking them to the ScienceWISE ontology, thus expanding content of their papers with supporting material in the form of encyclopedia-like articles.

(See also info on the arXiv: http://arxiv.org/help/sciencewise)

Answer 2

This question is a bit older, but I thought I would add a new suggestion to hopefully help anyone looking for something more current.

If you're looking for a tool to help you discover new papers based on related topics or papers you've already read to assist with scientific writing, I highly recommend using an online application/website called Research Rabbit.

They describe themselves as being like Spotify in that they learn from the papers you upload and collections (think playlists) of papers that you create and will modify their recommendations of new papers for you to look at that might be related. It also provides interactive visualizations showing how different publications connect based on their algorithm of relevance. All the papers can be connected to the reference library, Zotero, so you can save anything you find and use the Zotero tools for reference library organization and citation formatting.

I really enjoy using it to find papers and look through the literature, particularly on topics that I might be less familiar with.