A Survey of Citation Recommendation Tasks and Methods

Scientific articles store vast amounts of knowledge amassed through many decades of research. They serve to communicate research results among scientists but also for learning and tracking progress in the field. However, scientific production has risen to levels that make it difficult even for experts to keep up with work in their field. As a remedy, specialized search engines are being deployed, incorporating novel natural language processing and machine learning methods. The task of citation recommendation, in particular, has attracted much interest as it holds promise for improving the quality of scientific production. In this paper, we present the state-of-the-art in citation recommendation: we survey the methods for global and local approaches to the task, the evaluation setups and datasets, and the most successful machine learning models. In addition, we overview two tasks complementary to citation recommendation: extraction of key aspects and entities from articles and citation function classification. With this survey, we hope to provide the ground for understanding current efforts and stimulate further research in this exciting and promising field.

Systematic Design and Evaluation of a Citation Function Classification Scheme in Indonesian Journals

Classifying citations according to function has many benefits when it comes to information retrieval tasks, scholarly communication studies, and ranking metric developments. Many citation function classification schemes have been proposed, but most of them have not been systematically designed for an extensive literature-based compilation process. Many schemes were also not evaluated properly before being used for classification experiments utilizing large datasets. This paper aimed to build and evaluate new citation function categories based upon sufficient scientific evidence. A total of 2153 citation sentences were collected from Indonesian journal articles for our dataset. To identify the new categories, a literature survey was conducted, analyses and groupings of category meanings were carried out, and then categories were selected based on the dataset’s characteristics and the purpose of the classification. The evaluation used five criteria: coherence, ease, utility, balance, and coverage. Fleiss’ kappa and automatic classification metrics using machine learning and deep learning algorithms were used to assess the criteria. These methods resulted in five citation function categories. The scheme’s coherence and ease of use were quite good, as indicated by an inter-annotator agreement value of 0.659 and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) F1-score of 0.93. According to the balance and coverage criteria, the scheme still needs to be improved. This research data was limited to journals in food science published in Indonesia. Future research will involve classifying the citation function using a massive dataset collected from various scientific fields and published from some representative countries, as well as applying improved annotation schemes and deep learning methods.

A New Citation Recommendation Strategy Based on Term Functions in Related Studies Section

Purpose Researchers frequently encounter the following problems when writing scientific articles: (1) Selecting appropriate citations to support the research idea is challenging. (2) The literature review is not conducted extensively, which leads to working on a research problem that others have well addressed. This study focuses on citation recommendation in the related studies section by applying the term function of a citation context, potentially improving the efficiency of writing a literature review. Design/methodology/approach We present nine term functions with three newly created and six identified from existing literature. Using these term functions as labels, we annotate 531 research papers in three topics to evaluate our proposed recommendation strategy. BM25 and Word2vec with VSM are implemented as the baseline models for the recommendation. Then the term function information is applied to enhance the performance. Findings The experiments show that the term function-based methods outperform the baseline methods regarding the recall, precision, and F1-score measurement, demonstrating that term functions are useful in identifying valuable citations. Research limitations The dataset is insufficient due to the complexity of annotating citation functions for paragraphs in the related studies section. More recent deep learning models should be performed to future validate the proposed approach. Practical implications The citation recommendation strategy can be helpful for valuable citation discovery, semantic scientific retrieval, and automatic literature review generation. Originality/value The proposed citation function-based citation recommendation can generate intuitive explanations of the results for users, improving the transparency, persuasiveness, and effectiveness of recommender systems.

In - text citation function s of self ­ - citations: Implications for research evaluation practice

Self-citations have long been noted as a problem in citation analysis and are often excluded from the analyses based on the notion that self-citations may be included for egoistic or self-serving reasons. The present study, however, found that self-citations are less likely to function as nonessential citations than foreign citations, suggesting that self-citations should not be discounted in citation analysis, and should in fact be given more weight than foreign citations in weighted citation analysis. This study fills a gap in research on self-citations by examining the function of individual self-citation occurrences inciting articles as compared to foreign citations.

Citation function, polarity and influence classification

Current methods for assessing the impact of authors and scientific media employ tools such as H-Index, Co-Citation and PageRank. These tools are primarily based on citation counting, which considers all citations to be equal. This type of methods can produce perverse incentives to publish controversial or incomplete papers, as mixed or negative reviews often generate larger citation counts and better indexes, regardless of whether the citations were critical or exerted minimal influence on the citing document. Passing citations that are employed to establish background, which do not have a real impact on the citing paper, are common in scientific literature. However, these citations have equal weight in impact evaluations. Notable researchers have emphasized the need to correct this situation by developing estimation methods that consider the different roles of quotations in citing papers. To accomplish this type of evaluation, a context citation analysis should be applied to determine the nature of the citations. We propose that citations should be categorized using four dimensions – FUNCTION, POLARITY, ASPECTS and INFLUENCE – as these dimensions provide adequate information that can be employed toward the generation of a qualitative method to measure the impact of a given publication in a citing paper. In this paper, we used interchangeably the words influence and impact. We present a method for obtaining this information using our proposed classification scheme and manually annotated corpus, which is marked with meaningful keywords and labels to help identify the characteristics or properties that constitute what we call ASPECTS. We develop a classification scheme which considers purpose definition shared by previous works. Our contribution is to abstract purpose classes from several other schemes and divide a complex structure in more manageable parts, to attain a simple system that combines low granularity dimensions but nevertheless produces a fine-grained classification. For annotators, the classification process is simple because in a first step, the coders distinguish only four primary classes, and in a second pass, they add the information contained in ASPECTS keyword and labels to obtain the more specific functions. This way, we gain a high granularity labeling that gives enough information about the citations to characterize and classify them, and we achieve this detailed coding with a straightforward process where the level of human error could be minimized.