gene-cocite: a web application for extracting, visualising and assessing the cocitations of a list of genes

Background The outcome from the analysis of high through-put genomics experiments is commonly a list of genes. The most basic measure of association is whether the genes in the list have ever been cocited together. Results The web application gene-cocite accepts a list of genes and returns a list of the papers which cocite any two or more of the genes. The proportion of the genes which are cocited with at least one other gene is given, and the p -value for the probability of this proportion of cocitations occurring by chance from a random list of genes of the same length calculated. An interactive graph with links to papers is displayed, showing how the genes in the list are related to each other by publications. Conclusions gene-cocite ( http://sysbio.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/gene-cocite ) is designed to be an easy to use first step for biological researchers investigating the background of their list of genes.