IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/scient/v109y2016i3d10.1007_s11192-016-2134-8.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The linguistic patterns and rhetorical structure of citation context: an approach using n-grams

Author

Listed:
  • Marc Bertin

    (Université du Québec à Montréal)

  • Iana Atanassova

    (Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté)

  • Cassidy R. Sugimoto

    (Indiana University Bloomington)

  • Vincent Lariviere

    (Université de Montréal
    Université du Québec à Montréal)

Abstract

Using the full-text corpus of more than 75,000 research articles published by seven PLOS journals, this paper proposes a natural language processing approach for identifying the function of citations. Citation contexts are assigned based on the frequency of n-gram co-occurrences located near the citations. Results show that the most frequent linguistic patterns found in the citation contexts of papers vary according to their location in the IMRaD structure of scientific articles. The presence of negative citations is also dependent on this structure. This methodology offers new perspectives to locate these discursive forms according to the rhetorical structure of scientific articles, and will lead to a better understanding of the use of citations in scientific articles.

Suggested Citation

  • Marc Bertin & Iana Atanassova & Cassidy R. Sugimoto & Vincent Lariviere, 2016. "The linguistic patterns and rhetorical structure of citation context: an approach using n-grams," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(3), pages 1417-1434, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:109:y:2016:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-016-2134-8
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-016-2134-8
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-016-2134-8
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11192-016-2134-8?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ding, Ying & Liu, Xiaozhong & Guo, Chun & Cronin, Blaise, 2013. "The distribution of references across texts: Some implications for citation analysis," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(3), pages 583-592.
    2. Shengbo Liu & Chaomei Chen, 2012. "The proximity of co-citation," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 91(2), pages 495-511, May.
    3. Jesper W. Schneider, 2006. "Concept symbols revisited: Naming clusters by parsing and filtering of noun phrases from citation contexts of concept symbols," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 68(3), pages 573-593, September.
    4. Shengbo Liu & Chaomei Chen & Kun Ding & Bo Wang & Kan Xu & Yuan Lin, 2014. "Literature retrieval based on citation context," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(2), pages 1293-1307, November.
    5. Ben‐Ami Lipetz, 1965. "Improvement of the selectivity of citation indexes to science literature through inclusion of citation relationship indicators," American Documentation, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 16(2), pages 81-90, April.
    6. Marc Bertin & Iana Atanassova & Yves Gingras & Vincent Larivière, 2016. "The invariant distribution of references in scientific articles," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 67(1), pages 164-177, January.
    7. Gali Halevi & Henk F. Moed, 2013. "The thematic and conceptual flow of disciplinary research: A citation context analysis of the journal of informetrics, 2007," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 64(9), pages 1903-1913, September.
    8. Norman Kaplan, 1965. "The norms of citation behavior: Prolegomena to the footnote," American Documentation, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 16(3), pages 179-184, July.
    9. Yu-Wei Chang, 2013. "A comparison of citation contexts between natural sciences and social sciences and humanities," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 96(2), pages 535-553, August.
    10. Alison Callahan & Stephen Hockema & Gunther Eysenbach, 2010. "Contextual cocitation: Augmenting cocitation analysis and its applications," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 61(6), pages 1130-1143, June.
    11. Dangzhi Zhao & Andreas Strotmann, 2014. "In-text author citation analysis: Feasibility, benefits, and limitations," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 65(11), pages 2348-2358, November.
    12. Gali Halevi & Henk F. Moed, 2013. "The thematic and conceptual flow of disciplinary research: A citation context analysis of the journal of informetrics, 2007," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 64(9), pages 1903-1913, September.
    13. Kevin W. Boyack & Henry Small & Richard Klavans, 2013. "Improving the accuracy of co-citation clustering using full text," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 64(9), pages 1759-1767, September.
    14. Aaron Elkiss & Siwei Shen & Anthony Fader & Güneş Erkan & David States & Dragomir Radev, 2008. "Blind men and elephants: What do citation summaries tell us about a research article?," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 59(1), pages 51-62, January.
    15. Henry Small, 2004. "On the shoulders of Robert Merton: Towards a normative theory of citation," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 60(1), pages 71-79, May.
    16. Alison Callahan & Stephen Hockema & Gunther Eysenbach, 2010. "Contextual cocitation: Augmenting cocitation analysis and its applications," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 61(6), pages 1130-1143, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mingyang Wang & Jiaqi Zhang & Shijia Jiao & Xiangrong Zhang & Na Zhu & Guangsheng Chen, 2020. "Important citation identification by exploiting the syntactic and contextual information of citations," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(3), pages 2109-2129, December.
    2. Lutz Bornmann & Robin Haunschild & Sven E. Hug, 2018. "Visualizing the context of citations referencing papers published by Eugene Garfield: a new type of keyword co-occurrence analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 114(2), pages 427-437, February.
    3. Iman Tahamtan & Lutz Bornmann, 2019. "What do citation counts measure? An updated review of studies on citations in scientific documents published between 2006 and 2018," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 121(3), pages 1635-1684, December.
    4. Lutz Bornmann & Alexander Tekles, 2019. "Disruptive papers published in Scientometrics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(1), pages 331-336, July.
    5. Bowen Ma & Chengzhi Zhang & Yuzhuo Wang & Sanhong Deng, 2022. "Enhancing identification of structure function of academic articles using contextual information," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(2), pages 885-925, February.
    6. Sven E. Hug & Martin P. Brändle, 2017. "The coverage of Microsoft Academic: analyzing the publication output of a university," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(3), pages 1551-1571, December.
    7. Eugenio Petrovich, 2018. "Accumulation of knowledge in para-scientific areas: the case of analytic philosophy," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 116(2), pages 1123-1151, August.
    8. Small, Henry, 2018. "Characterizing highly cited method and non-method papers using citation contexts: The role of uncertainty," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(2), pages 461-480.
    9. Hei-Chia Wang & Jen-Wei Cheng & Che-Tsung Yang, 2022. "SentCite: a sentence-level citation recommender based on the salient similarity among multiple segments," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(5), pages 2521-2546, May.
    10. Muhammad Touseef Ikram & Muhammad Tanvir Afzal, 2019. "Aspect based citation sentiment analysis using linguistic patterns for better comprehension of scientific knowledge," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(1), pages 73-95, April.
    11. Lutz Bornmann & Robin Haunschild, 2017. "Quality and impact considerations in bibliometrics: a reply to Ricker (in press)," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 111(3), pages 1857-1859, June.
    12. Shengzhi Huang & Jiajia Qian & Yong Huang & Wei Lu & Yi Bu & Jinqing Yang & Qikai Cheng, 2022. "Disclosing the relationship between citation structure and future impact of a publication," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 73(7), pages 1025-1042, July.
    13. Lutz Bornmann & K. Brad Wray & Robin Haunschild, 2020. "Citation concept analysis (CCA): a new form of citation analysis revealing the usefulness of concepts for other researchers illustrated by exemplary case studies including classic books by Thomas S. K," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 122(2), pages 1051-1074, February.
    14. Bart Thijs, 2020. "Using neural-network based paragraph embeddings for the calculation of within and between document similarities," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(2), pages 835-849, November.
    15. Tahamtan, Iman & Bornmann, Lutz, 2018. "Core elements in the process of citing publications: Conceptual overview of the literature," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 203-216.
    16. Shi, Xuanyu & Du, Jian, 2022. "Distinguishing transformative from incremental clinical evidence: A classifier of clinical research using textual features from abstracts and citing sentences," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(2).
    17. Martin Ricker, 2017. "Letter to the Editor: About the quality and impact of scientific articles," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 111(3), pages 1851-1855, June.
    18. Zhiya Zuo & Kang Zhao, 2021. "Understanding and predicting future research impact at different career stages—A social network perspective," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 72(4), pages 454-472, April.
    19. Sergey Parinov, 2021. "Citation contexts as a data source for evaluation of scholarly consumption," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(11), pages 9249-9265, November.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Dangzhi Zhao & Andreas Strotmann, 2020. "Telescopic and panoramic views of library and information science research 2011–2018: a comparison of four weighting schemes for author co-citation analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(1), pages 255-270, July.
    2. Wang, Shiyun & Mao, Jin & Lu, Kun & Cao, Yujie & Li, Gang, 2021. "Understanding interdisciplinary knowledge integration through citance analysis: A case study on eHealth," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(4).
    3. Maryam Yaghtin & Hajar Sotudeh & Mahdieh Mirzabeigi & Seyed Mostafa Fakhrahmad & Mehdi Mohammadi, 2019. "In quest of new document relations: evaluating co-opinion relations between co-citations and its impact on Information retrieval effectiveness," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(2), pages 987-1008, May.
    4. Raja Habib & Muhammad Tanvir Afzal, 2019. "Sections-based bibliographic coupling for research paper recommendation," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(2), pages 643-656, May.
    5. Kim, Ha Jin & Jeong, Yoo Kyung & Song, Min, 2016. "Content- and proximity-based author co-citation analysis using citation sentences," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(4), pages 954-966.
    6. Tahamtan, Iman & Bornmann, Lutz, 2018. "Core elements in the process of citing publications: Conceptual overview of the literature," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 203-216.
    7. Sehrish Iqbal & Saeed-Ul Hassan & Naif Radi Aljohani & Salem Alelyani & Raheel Nawaz & Lutz Bornmann, 2021. "A decade of in-text citation analysis based on natural language processing and machine learning techniques: an overview of empirical studies," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(8), pages 6551-6599, August.
    8. Iman Tahamtan & Lutz Bornmann, 2019. "What do citation counts measure? An updated review of studies on citations in scientific documents published between 2006 and 2018," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 121(3), pages 1635-1684, December.
    9. Masaki Eto, 2013. "Evaluations of context-based co-citation searching," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 94(2), pages 651-673, February.
    10. Annarelli, Alessandro & Battistella, Cinzia & Nonino, Fabio & Parida, Vinit & Pessot, Elena, 2021. "Literature review on digitalization capabilities: Co-citation analysis of antecedents, conceptualization and consequences," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 166(C).
    11. Dongqing Lyu & Xuanmin Ruan & Juan Xie & Ying Cheng, 2021. "The classification of citing motivations: a meta-synthesis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(4), pages 3243-3264, April.
    12. Zhang, Chengzhi & Liu, Lifan & Wang, Yuzhuo, 2021. "Characterizing references from different disciplines: A perspective of citation content analysis," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(2).
    13. Shengbo Liu & Chaomei Chen & Kun Ding & Bo Wang & Kan Xu & Yuan Lin, 2014. "Literature retrieval based on citation context," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(2), pages 1293-1307, November.
    14. Jeong, Yoo Kyung & Song, Min & Ding, Ying, 2014. "Content-based author co-citation analysis," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 8(1), pages 197-211.
    15. Rey-Long Liu, 2017. "A new bibliographic coupling measure with descriptive capability," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 110(2), pages 915-935, February.
    16. Horbach, Serge & Aagaard, Kaare & Schneider, Jesper W., 2021. "Meta-Research: How problematic citing practices distort science," MetaArXiv aqyhg, Center for Open Science.
    17. Michel Zitt, 2015. "Meso-level retrieval: IR-bibliometrics interplay and hybrid citation-words methods in scientific fields delineation," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 102(3), pages 2223-2245, March.
    18. Shengbo Liu & Chaomei Chen, 2012. "The proximity of co-citation," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 91(2), pages 495-511, May.
    19. Boyack, Kevin W. & van Eck, Nees Jan & Colavizza, Giovanni & Waltman, Ludo, 2018. "Characterizing in-text citations in scientific articles: A large-scale analysis," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 59-73.
    20. Kamal Sanguri & Atanu Bhuyan & Sabyasachi Patra, 2020. "A semantic similarity adjusted document co-citation analysis: a case of tourism supply chain," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(1), pages 233-269, October.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:109:y:2016:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-016-2134-8. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.