Building a Citation Network to Analyze in R
I don't understand if you want to build a network of authors who cite each other, or a network of papers who cite other papers (which would be a much sparser network because the coauthorship relationships won't show up as edges).

I would follow a strategy similar to this one (off the top of my head):


Assign ids to your papers
Build 2 csv files : papers.csv, citations.csv
read in 2-col csv file "paper.csv" as a two-column data frame:  col1: paper_id, col2: title 
read in 2-col csv file "citations.csv" as a two-column data frame:  col1: paper_id, col2: cites_id, 


With R's igraph package, you can construct a  network pg (for papers_graph) 
with (pseudocode)

pg &lt;- igraph::graph_from_data_frame(citations)

Then you assign "vertex attributes" to the nodes in the network:

pg &lt;- set_vertex_attribute(pg, "title", value= papers) 
# same as:  V(pg)$title &lt;- papers$title


(and possibly many other attributes)

Then you can use igraph's many functions (~200) to analyze the network.

For visualizations, you plot the ids, and use a diagram type which gives you the title when you move the mouse over / click on the node symbol (which is labeled only with the id to save screen space). You can use other design elements such as coloring the nodes by release year for instance).