Content‐based citation analysis: The next generation of citation analysis
Abstract
Traditional citation analysis has been widely applied to detect patterns of scientific collaboration, map the landscapes of scholarly disciplines, assess the impact of research outputs, and observe knowledge transfer across domains. It is, however, limited, as it assumes all citations are of similar value and weights each equally. Content‐based citation analysis ( CCA ) addresses a citation's value by interpreting each one based on its context at both the syntactic and semantic levels. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of CAA research in terms of its theoretical foundations, methodical approaches, and example applications. In addition, we highlight how increased computational capabilities and publicly available full‐text resources have opened this area of research to vast possibilities, which enable deeper citation analysis, more accurate citation prediction, and increased knowledge discovery.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Scite offers the capability to conduct keyword searches in titles and abstracts, and uniquely, to search for specific terms within 'citation statements'.
“Scite offers the capability to conduct keyword searches in titles and abstracts, and uniquely, to search for specific terms within 'citation statements' (Nicholson et al. 2021), i.e., segments of text that include a citation (Ding et al. 2014).”
From Artificial intelligence for literature reviews: opportunities and challenges (2024) · cites this paper as Ding et al. 2014
Cites
The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research
Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (2017) · Aldine (Routledge reprint) · doi:10.4324/9780203793206 · Cited by 25,789 · see citing works
Nigel Gilbert, G. (1977) · Social Studies of Science · doi:10.1177/030631277700700112 · Cited by 691 · see citing works
Content Analysis of References: Adjunct or Alternative to Citation Counting?
Chubin, D. E., & Moitra, S. D. (1975) · Social Studies of Science · doi:10.1177/030631277500500403 · Cited by 357 · see citing works
Zhang, G., Ding, Y., & Milojević, S. (2013) · Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology · doi:10.1002/asi.22850 · Cited by 169 · cited 1× · see citing works
“Citation count remains the dominant measure of article impact (Borgman, 1990; Ziman, 1968).”
BackgroundSelf-citationAuthor Judgements about Works They Cite: Three Studies from Psychology Journals
Shadish, W. R., Tolliver, D., Gray, M., & Sen Gupta, S. K. (1995) · Social Studies of Science · doi:10.1177/030631295025003003 · Cited by 165 · see citing works
A classification of citation roles for the social sciences and related fields
Peritz, B. C. (1983) · Scientometrics · doi:10.1007/bf02147226 · Cited by 105 · see citing works
The use of citations in literary research: A preliminary classification of citation functions
(1979) · The Library Quarterly · doi:10.1086/600930 · Cited by 104 · cited 2× · see citing works
“Frost (1979) divided citation usage based on the type of cited text (e.g., other scholar views, primary text, previous scholarship).”
Background
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
S2ORC: The Semantic Scholar Open Research Corpus
Lo, K., Wang, L. L., Neumann, M., Kinney, R., & Weld, D. (2020) · Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics · doi:10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.447 · Cited by 457 · see citing works
Artificial intelligence for literature reviews: opportunities and challenges
Bolaños, F., Salatino, A., Osborne, F., & Motta, E. (2024) · Artificial Intelligence Review · doi:10.1007/s10462-024-10902-3 · Cited by 246 · see citing works
Measuring the Evolution of a Scientific Field through Citation Frames
Jurgens, D., Kumar, S., Hoover, R., McFarland, D., & Jurafsky, D. (2018) · Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics · doi:10.1162/tacl_a_00028 · Cited by 212 · see citing works
Core Elements in the Process of Citing Publications: Conceptual Overview of the Literature
Tahamtan, I., & Bornmann, L. (2018) · Journal of Informetrics · doi:10.1016/j.joi.2018.01.002 · Cited by 149 · see citing works
Hsiao, T.-K., & Schneider, J. (2021) · Quantitative Science Studies · doi:10.1162/qss_a_00155 · Cited by 98 · see citing works
A Data Driven Approach for Compound Figure Separation Using Convolutional Neural Networks
Tsutsui, S., & Crandall, D. J. (2017) · 2017 14th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) · doi:10.1109/icdar.2017.93 · Cited by 40 · see citing works
- Authors
- Ding, Y., Zhang, G., Chambers, T., Song, M., Wang, X., & Zhai, C.
- Affiliations
- Indiana University Bloomington (US)
- Department of Information & Library Science School of Informatics & Computing Indiana University 1320 E. 10th St., LI 011 Bloomington IN 47405‐3907
- Yonsei University (KR)
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (US)
- Venue
- Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2014-06-06
- Volume
- 65
- Issue
- 9
- Pages
- 1820-1833
- ISSN
- 2330-1635 (ISSN-L)
- 2330-1643
- OpenAlex
- W1602102908
- Cited by
- 252
- References
- 7
- Citations by year
- 2026: 16 · 2025: 16 · 2024: 17 · 2023: 17 · 2022: 20 · 2021: 40 · 2020: 28 · 2019: 31 · 2018: 23 · 2017: 18 · 2016: 11 · 2015: 13 · 2014: 2
- FWCI
- 14.31
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Web visibility and informetrics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Psychology Research and Bibliometrics
- Keywords
- citation analysis, citation prediction, full-text resources, knowledge discovery, research impact assessment, research collaboration
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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