Thursday, July 1, 2010 | 5:30 PM
Ever wanted to trace an article’s impact? Take for example Einstein’s famous paper Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?, which has shaped areas as disparate as physics, computer science, and philosophy. We can examine the article’s influence by looking at citations to it, but there are thousands of citations and sifting through them is unwieldy.
Today we’re launching the ability to search within this set. We can see this article’s impact on quantum computation, cryptography, entanglement, or teleportation. We can see its continuing influence on multiple fields by looking at recent citations to it. And we can even discover topics that Einstein probably never thought he would influence, like holism and postmodernism.
Try it out yourself by clicking on a "Cited by" link on the search results page:
and selecting the "Search within articles citing..." checkbox:
Thank you to those who contacted us to request this feature and hats off to the few who figured out how to emulate it by tweaking the URL. We hope this helps you to follow the impact and evolution of ideas.
Posted by James Connor, Software Engineer