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RefViz 2, Philadelphia: Thomson ISI ResearchSoft, 2003-2005. $299.95 (System requirements: Microsoft Windows 2000/ XP/Vista, 256MB RAM, 1 GB free disk space; Mac OS X (10.3 or later), Power Mac G5, JAVA 1.4.2 or later, 256MB RAM, 1 GB free disk space)
Any researcher who has faced the daunting task of perusing over one thousand bibliographic records retrieved in response to a search query will be thrilled with the capabilities of RefViz for saving time and effort. RefViz is a textual analysis and visualization package intended to be used with bibliographic records and moves beyond normal searching software to allow the searcher to analyze search results and identify major themes and patterns within a body of literature. It is particularly useful for working with large bodies of literature, that is, those with one thousand or more items. A brief description of the steps usually followed is noted to illustrate its functions:
* The data for analysis consist usually of bibliographic records with abstracts. These may be input from an existing personal database or from a search in one or more commercial databases. RefViz's searching component, Reference Retriever,...