Do Peers See More in a Paper Than Its Authors?

Abstract

Recent years have shown a gradual shift in the content of biomedical publications that is freely accessible, from titles and abstracts to full text. This has enabled new forms of automatic text analysis and has given rise to some interesting questions: How informative is the abstract compared to the full-text? What important information in the full-text is not present in the abstract? What should a good summary contain that is not already in the abstract? Do authors and peers see an article differently? We answer these questions by comparing the information content of the abstract to that in citances—sentences containing citations to that article. We contrast the important points of an article as judged by its authors versus as seen by peers. Focusing on the area of molecular interactions, we perform manual and automatic analysis, and we find that the set of all citances to a target article not only covers most information (entities, functions, experimental methods, and other biological concepts) found in its abstract, but also contains 20% more concepts. We further present a detailed summary of the differences across information types, and we examine the effects other citations and time have on the content of citances.

Colil: a database and search service for citation contexts in the life sciences domain

“…For example, papers cited in five or fewer citation contexts account for approximately 76 % of all the cited papers in the Colil database. One of the factors causing this issue is that the number of PubMed-indexed papers in PMC-OAS only corresponds to approximately 4 % of total PubMed entries at present; however, we expect that this situation will gradually improve because open access publications are gaining popularity and becoming the norm [ 9 ]. Figure 7 shows the exponential growth of PMC-OAS papers over recent years, and the number of the PubMed-indexed papers in PMC-OAS corresponds to approximately 14 % of the entire PubMed entries published from 2010 to 2014.…”

“…Qazvinian and Radev [ 2 ] and Mei and Zhai [ 7 ] argued that citation contexts are useful for creating a summary of the important aspects of a paper. Furthermore, Elkiss et al [ 8 ] and Divoli et al [ 9 ] examined the relationships between the abstract and the citation contexts of a given life sciences paper, and their experiments showed that citation contexts tend to have additional and focused information that is not present in the abstract. These results indicate that citation contexts play an important role in representing the semantic content of life sciences papers.…”

Generating a Citation Summary Based on Cited Sentences and the Implied Citation Emotions

“…Researchers have stated that citation contexts tend to contain more focused information that is not present in the target scientific paper's abstract [4]. Provided that it has accumulated enough citations, the set of cited sentences drawn from a scientific paper covers all the information found in its abstract and provides about 20% additional concepts [17]. Thus, researchers are increasingly concerned about the use of cited sentences to generate summary, in order to illustrate the impact of the target paper [3] [18][19][20].…”

We Can Explain Your Research in Layman's Terms: Towards Automating Science Journalism at Scale

“…Summarization of Scientific Documents Abu-Jbara and Radev (2011) produced readable and coherent citationbased summaries improving upon a history of related work (Nanba, Kando, and Okumura 2000;Nakov, Schwartz, and Hearst 2004;Elkiss et al 2008;Qazvinian and Radev 2008;Mei and Zhai 2008;Mohammad et al 2009;Divoli, Nakov, and Hearst 2012). Collins, Augenstein, and Riedel (2017) studied extractive summarization of scientific papers to highlights, following a history of predominantly extractive summarization of scientific documents (Kupiec, Pedersen, and Chen 1995;Saggion, AbuRa'ed, and Ronzano 2016).…”