CiteTraverse

CiteTraverse is local-first software for citation discovery, snowball sampling, and literature-review screening. It helps you start from a small seed set, expand the citation graph, and keep every screening decision auditable. CiteTraverse targets systematic literature review process with the snowball sampling approach.

Core Ideas

• Boxes represent review state: Inbox, Included, Deferred, Excluded, and Queued.
• Expansion providers fetch references and citing papers from OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, Crossref, or OpenCitations.
• History records project events so important changes can be inspected and restored.
• Local-first storage keeps authoritative project data in ordinary files.
• Assistant provides workspace-aware help, summaries, and optional OpenAI-compatible chat from the docked assistant pane.

Start Here

Use the desktop app for full local filesystem support, or use the browser app (click Try it from the site header) when you want a zero-install surface.

For a complete walkthrough, start with the review workflow. For individual capabilities, use the Key Features section:

• Project setup and storage
• Import and citation expansion
• Queue and screening
• Review organization
• Workspace surfaces
• Progress, history, and assistant
• Advanced filtering and metrics
• Hosts and deployment

What You Can Do

• Create a project and import seed papers from BibTeX.
• Expand backward references and forward citations from selected papers.
• Screen discoveries through Inbox, Included, Deferred, Excluded, and Queued.
• Filter and organize papers with tags, collections, and the built-in Seed tag.
• Explore the same corpus as a sortable table, a graph, and a history timeline.
• Review coverage, citation-neighbor counts, metadata, notes, PDFs, and raw BibTeX in the detail pane.
• Use the assistant to ask about the workspace, produce included-paper reports, and run approved snowball sampling actions.

What A Project Contains

A CiteTraverse project is centered on review boxes. Included holds seeds and accepted papers, Inbox holds discoveries ready for screening, Queued keeps candidates that have not entered the active corpus, and Deferred / Excluded preserve decisions that should not disappear. Citation edges, metadata completion, settings, notes, tags, collections, jobs, and history stay attached to those papers so the review can be audited later.

Main Surfaces

• Paper list: sortable and configurable screening table with keyboard navigation, tags, selection, citation counts, and row-level actions.
• Detail pane: paper metadata, DOI/URL, local PDF access on desktop, notes, tags, collections, raw BibTeX, coverage metrics, and neighbor counts.
• Graph view: citation relationships and temporal layout for seeing how the corpus is connected across publication years.
• Jobs panel: active and finished expansion jobs for forward and backward searches.
• History view: auditable event trail with restore support when a snapshot is available.
• Assistant pane: local workspace help, included-paper reports, optional remote chat, and approval-gated workspace tools.