Musings of a 21st-century researcher

I've been using Goodreads for a while now to keep track of the books that I read, and one of its features I find most useful is the new one that recommends books you might like based on ones you've already read/reviewed. I always get the best recs from friends who know my tastes, but Goodreads' system is still helpful when I'm not sure where to start.

I'm in the process of pulling together a bibliography for my MA essay (about the truly zany gothic novel Zofloya -- more on this later!) and finding myself wishing that there were a similar feature specific to the scholarly community. So often I scour books of literary criticism for their footnotes/works cited, looking to see who's quoting what and using that research to get a sense for the other books I should be reading on the topic. I've been using citation management software to keep track of the books I've read and cited on this project so far, but I wish there was a way to link that bibliography-in-progress to a database containing other scholars' bibliographies, past and present -- a database that would analyze everyone's input, look at the kinds of books/articles/authors that are often cited together, and provide me with recommendations for other works I might want to check out based on the ones that I'm currently reading.

Of course, there are drawbacks to this kind of recommendation system. Sometimes the best research projects result from pairing texts or fields of inquiry that haven't been previously considered in tandem. Sometimes I go to the library looking for a single specific book, only to find several others shelved nearby that are just as relevant to my project, but which I never would have known to look for in the library catalogue. But I can't help thinking that specialized database like this would still be helpful -- so helpful, in fact, that I have a niggling feeling it may already exist and I just haven't heard about it yet.