The increasing availability of repositories of peer-reviewed scientific literature, like Scopus and WOS, and the growth of Open Access data providers and specialized search engines offer to the users a huge amount of data, which is often difficult to connect and aggregate in sharable formats. Furthermore the deriving bibliographic metadata represent an interesting resource for research evaluation and for highlighting the groups and the progress in specific areas. In order to build reasoned

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... ographies on specific topics, key items are the papers, the authors, the interrelationships among papers and authors together with the connections given by citations. Traditional repositories, although contain the single pieces of information, generally do not offer for them holistic, aggregated, and graphical views; each search furnishes new results, which are difficult to correlate with previous ones. Our work faces these issues proposing VisualBib, a Web application prototype: it enables user to progressively create, visualize and share bibliographies, which are represented by narrative views. This paper presents VisualBib, a Web application realized to support the researchers who wish to create, refine and visualize bibliography; starting with a small set of significant papers or from a restricted number of authors, the users can enrich it by exploring citing/cited references. The narrative view and the explicit representation of the authorship and citing relations help users to build cohesive bibliographies and to disseminate the research on a specific topic through the sharing of personal points of view.