An analysis of citation functions in the humanities and social sciences research from the perspective of problematic citation analysis assumptions

The purpose of this paper is to update the review of Bornmann and Daniel (2008) presenting a narrative review of studies on citations in scientific documents. The current review covers 41 studies published between 2006 and 2018. Bornmann and Daniel (2008) focused on earlier years. The current review describes the (new) studies on citation content and context analyses as well as the studies that explore the citation motivation of scholars through surveys or interviews. One focus in this paper is on the technical developments in the last decade, such as the richer meta-data available and machine-readable formats of scientific papers. These developments have resulted in citation context analyses of large datasets in comprehensive studies (which was not possible previously). Many studies in recent years have used computational and machine learning techniques to determine citation functions and polarities, some of which have attempted to overcome the methodological weaknesses of previous studies. The automated recognition of citation functions seems to have the potential to greatly enhance citation indices and information retrieval capabilities. Our review of the empirical studies demonstrates that a paper may be cited for very different scientific and non-scientific reasons. This result accords with the finding by Bornmann and Daniel (2008). The current review also shows that to better understand the relationship between citing and cited documents, a variety of features should be analyzed, primarily the citation context, the semantics and linguistic patterns in citations, citation locations within the citing document, and citation polarity (negative, neutral, positive).

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“…Another study found more "negational" citations in the humanities than social sciences (4.17% versus 1.7%) (Lin, 2018).…”

Section: Summarizing the Empirical Resultsmentioning

confidence: 97%

What do citation counts measure? An updated review of studies on citations in scientific documents published between 2006 and 2018

2019

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“…This is confirmed more explicitly by Small (2004), when he says about a possible theory of citation: "Such a theory must encompass the spectrum of observed behaviours from the most common forms such as ceremonial or perfunctory citation to the less common deviant cases, such as negative citation, self-citation, and misattribution.". This is the line of thinking that Lin (2018) has "inadvertently" adopted in his citation annotation protocol: "as long as a citation does not carry a negational attitude, it is considered confirmative. "…”

Section: Positive Polarity By Defaultmentioning

confidence: 99%

Critical citations in knowledge construction and citation analysis: from paradox to definition

Bordignon

2022

Scientometrics

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Critical citations are lacking a common definition in relation to extant research on knowledge construction and citation analysis, whereas studies on these topics seem to provide a fully relevant theoretical framework, making criticism an essential phenomenon for the progress of science. We propose to explain this paradox by the fact that a citation seems to have a positive polarity by default and that a polarity shift is the result of a stronger commitment on the part of the author. This results in the use of specific cue words. By studying the labels (and their associated definitions) that 53 other studies equated with the concept of critical citation, we identified 3 functions on which to base the definition of critical citation: "to criticize", "to compare" and "to question" other works. While these studies seem to consider the criticize function as central and probably more frequent, the analysis of a corpus of 51 text snippets containing a citation (all retrieved from those same studies) reveals that the citations considered as critical by these same authors are often comparisons between results rather than blunt attacks against the cited works. This three-function based definition and the set of wordings gathered in this study provide a new basis for the design of tools dedicated to citation polarity detection. Indeed, the lexical and grammatical markers characterizing comparison must be taken into account in addition to those expressing a negative evaluation and those expressing doubt.

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“…In 1955, Garfield proposed using the citation frequency of academic papers to evaluate the influence of academic papers (Garfield, 1955). In recent years, some scholars have studied the influencing factors of academic papers by exploring the correlation between citation frequency and their subject areas, reference documents, the language of published journals and the reputation of authors (Bornmann and Marx, 2013;Bornmann et al, 2012;Rezaei et al, 2012); some scholars believe that different citations will affect the citation value of the paper (Lin, 2018). In addition, some scholars have explored the impact of social media promotion on academic papers (Botting et al, 2017;Xia et al, 2016).…”

Section: Related Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of the original influencing factors and secondary influencing factors of academic papers

Rong

2019

LHT

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Purpose The influencing factors of academic papers have always been the focus of attention in the field of Scientometrics. Exploring the influencing factors of altmetrics indicators and traditional literature indicators on academic papers is beneficial to better explore the potential significance and value of academic papers in the evaluation of scientific research. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach Based on the latest JCR citation report, this paper selects 22 academic journals in the JIF Quartile Q1 journal of Information Science and Library Science, and then obtains the evaluation data of these journal papers from WOS database and Altmetric.com. This paper uses literature measurement, correlation analysis and regression analysis to explore the influencing factors of the paper. Findings The results show that the original influencing factors of academic papers have a significant impact on secondary influencing factors. What is more obvious is that the number of references (nr) presents a significant positive correlation with the total number of times (Z9), the number of uses (U1) and (U2). Originality/value This paper combines traditional literature indicators with Altmetrics indicators to study the influencing factors through primary influencing factors and secondary influencing factors. Through research, it denies the phenomenon that academic circles have published academic papers in the world in recent years to overemphasize certain factors to improve the influence of the paper.

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An analysis of citation functions in the humanities and social sciences research from the perspective of problematic citation analysis assumptions

Cited by 23 publications

References 21 publications

What do citation counts measure? An updated review of studies on citations in scientific documents published between 2006 and 2018

What do citation counts measure? An updated review of studies on citations in scientific documents published between 2006 and 2018

Critical citations in knowledge construction and citation analysis: from paradox to definition

Analysis of the original influencing factors and secondary influencing factors of academic papers

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