Finding the shortest citation path between two academic papers? [closed]

I really like your question. I think it would be a really interesting way to represent the iterative refinement of ideas over time.

It's worth mentioning that in reviewing literature we usually visualize connected papers in a graph. ConnectedPapers (https://www.connectedpapers.com/) and ResearchRabbit (https://www.researchrabbit.ai/) are two popular tools for this type of analysis. If you haven't used them before, I'd really recommend to try them out. Especially ResearchRabbit often manages to find the types of interesting connections you are referring to.

Nevertheless, these tools don't aim to offer a historical storyline, which is actually a really interesting endeavor. I'm not aware of a tool that does exactly what you're looking for. So how would you get started? One thing to note is that you need some underlying 'total' set of papers to create the graph for your shortest path. Do you have such a set of papers? If not, that would be your first task. You could consider downloading some set of papers that would likely include all the papers that are potentially relevant and then start connecting them through references/citations. Doing this manually would take quite some time, but may be worth it if you don't want to sacrifice accuracy. Automating Snowballing (the name of this process) is difficult, but this code may help: https://github.com/JoaoFelipe/Snowballing. Once you have the distances it should be quite doable to calculate a shortest route between two papers.

One final remark is that there is a more general version of this problem which may offer an interesting research methodology in general. If you have a set of relevant papers and their citation/reference distances, you could also consider the problem of finding the smallest number of routes such that you cover all papers; essentially a variant of the vehicle routing problem. This would then correspond to the most concise set of storylines describing the history of the subject you're considering. Pretty cool!