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Linguistic perspectives in deciphering citation function classification

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Abstract

Understanding citations within their context is a complex task in information science, critical for bibliometric analysis. The study of citation contexts and their types has been a central issue in recent work on citations. In this paper, we present an experiment on the semantic annotation of citation contexts using a rule-based approach. We processed articles from seven PLOS journals and performed semantic annotation of citation contexts based on linguistic resources we constructed. We built on previous work on verb form analysis, n-grams, and semantic category modeling in the form of a linguistic ontology. Based on our observations, we propose directions of work for the constitution of a semantically annotated corpora. The intermediate results obtained lead us to formulate hypotheses on the relation between the IMRaD structure and certain semantic categories. Furthermore, our results demonstrate the semantic richness of citation contexts and underscore the importance of access to full-text articles for ontology population in open science. The findings suggest that semantic categories vary across disciplines and rhetorical structures, necessitating further exploration with larger and more diverse datasets.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ELICO, Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University, 43 Boulevard du 11 novembre 1918, 69622, Villeurbanne Cedex, France

    Marc Bertin

  2. Université de Franche-Comté, CRIT, 25000, Besançon, France

    Iana Atanassova

  3. Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), Paris, France

    Iana Atanassova

Authors
  1. Marc Bertin
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  2. Iana Atanassova
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Correspondence to Marc Bertin.

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Conflict of interest

This work was supported by ANR-20-CE38-0003-01. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. This paper is an extended version of Bertin and Atanassova (2023a), presented at the 19th International Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics, held from July 2–5, 2023, in Bloomington, IN, USA.

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Bertin, M., Atanassova, I. Linguistic perspectives in deciphering citation function classification. Scientometrics 129, 6301–6313 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-05082-4

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