Digital Science's Dimensions is envisaged as a next-generation research and
discovery platform for a better and 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, policy makers, and 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 successively 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 API 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.Comment: 16 figure
