Finding the most relevant and influential research papers is one of the biggest challenges in biomedical science. Traditional keyword searches often return thousands of results, while "related articles" tools rarely explain why certain papers are recommended.
To address this gap, RNfinity's PubMed Citation Network Tool provides a citation-based approach to literature discovery, designed specifically for biomedical and clinical researchers.
Unlike standard PubMed searches, this tool allows you to input up to 30 PubMed articles at once and automatically builds a citation network around them. It identifies all papers that cite or are cited by your selected seed articles, creating a structured map of the surrounding literature.
This process—often referred to as citation snowballing—is widely used in systematic and scoping reviews, but traditionally requires hours of manual work. The PubMed Citation Network Tool automates this workflow in seconds.
What sets this tool apart is its network-based relevance ranking. Instead of relying on keyword similarity or opaque recommendation algorithms, papers are ranked based on how strongly they are connected within the citation network itself.
Articles that are cited by multiple seed papers or that play a central role within the network rise to the top, helping researchers quickly identify:
Because the tool is built directly on PubMed citation data, it is particularly well suited for biomedical and clinical research. It complements traditional PubMed searches by focusing on relationships between papers, rather than text alone.
Researchers commonly use the PubMed Citation Network Tool to:
Transparency is a core feature of the PubMed Citation Network Tool. Relevance scores are derived from clear citation signals within the network, not from black-box machine learning models. This makes the results easier to interpret, explain, and justify in academic and clinical settings.
The tool is web-based, free to use, and requires no institutional subscription. Whether you are conducting a systematic review, preparing a grant application, or exploring a new biomedical research area, it provides a faster and more structured way to understand the literature landscape.
Researchers familiar with citation-graph tools such as Connected Papers will recognize the value of visualizing relationships between studies. The PubMed Citation Network Tool builds on this idea by supporting multiple seed articles and using PubMed-native citation data with transparent relevance scoring.
