Cited by 233scientometrics and bibliometrics researchWeb visibility and informetricsAcademic Writing and Publishing

Measuring the Evolution of a Scientific Field through Citation Frames

Open access
Jurgens, David, Kumar, Srijan, Hoover, Raine, McFarland, Dan, Jurafsky, Dan·2018·Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Abstract

Citations have long been used to characterize the state of a scientific field and to identify influential works. However, writers use citations for different purposes, and this varied purpose influences uptake by future scholars. Unfortunately, our understanding of how scholars use and frame citations has been limited to small-scale manual citation analysis of individual papers. We perform the largest behavioral study of citations to date, analyzing how scientific works frame their contributions through different types of citations and how this framing affects the field as a whole. We introduce a new dataset of nearly 2,000 citations annotated for their function, and use it to develop a state-of-the-art classifier and label the papers of an entire field: Natural Language Processing. We then show how differences in framing affect scientific uptake and reveal the evolution of the publication venues and the field as a whole. We demonstrate that authors are sensitive to discourse structure and publication venue when citing, and that how a paper frames its work through citations is predictive of the citation count it will receive. Finally, we use changes in citation framing to show that the field of NLP is undergoing a significant increase in consensus.

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Registry

Crossref · 10.1162/tacl_a_00028

Cites

80 of 80 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

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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?

  • ACL-ARC contains 1,941 citation instances from 186 papers.

    “ACL-ARC is a dataset of citation intents released by Jurgens et al. (2018). The dataset is based on a sample of papers from the ACL Anthology Reference Corpus (Bird et al., 2008) and includes 1,941 citation instances from 186 papers and is annotated by domain experts in the NLP field.”

    From Structural Scaffolds for Citation Intent Classification in Scientific Publications (2019) · cites this paper as Jurgens et al., 2018

    The Class Description section reports 1,969 annotated citation instances, not 1,941. It says these came from 52 fully labeled papers and 133 additional papers, totaling 185 rather than 186. Page number is unavailable in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.90)

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    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Previous state-of-the-art (Jurgens et al., 2018) achieves macro F1 54.6 on ACL-ARC.

    “previous state-of-the-art results of Jurgens et al. (2018) 54.6”

    From Structural Scaffolds for Citation Intent Classification in Scientific Publications (2019) · cites this paper as Jurgens et al., 2018

    Table 7 reports a macro F1 of 0.530 for the authors’ classifier, not 0.546. The Experimental Setup describes evaluation on a combined citation-function dataset, so the paper also does not establish 54.6 as an ACL-ARC result. (LLM, conf=0.88)

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    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • The proposed model achieves a new state-of-the-art on the ACL-ARC dataset with a 13.3% absolute increase in F1 score over the previous state-of-the-art.

    “Our model achieves a new state-ofthe-art on an existing ACL anthology dataset (ACL-ARC) with a 13.3% absolute increase in F1 score, without relying on external linguistic resources or hand-engineered features as done in existing methods.”

    From Structural Scaffolds for Citation Intent Classification in Scientific Publications (2019) · cites this paper as Jurgens et al., 2018

    Section 3.3 (page unavailable) says the paper’s methods outperformed the closest state of the art, supporting the general performance claim. It does not report a 13.3-percentage-point absolute F1 increase in the passages found; Section 3.2 describes evaluation on a combined citation-function dataset rather than establishing that figure for ACL-ARC. (LLM, conf=0.85)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Citation context includes text spans in a citing paper describing a referenced work and is the primary signal in intent classification.

    “A citation context includes text spans in a citing paper describing a referenced work and has been shown to be the primary signal in intent classification (Teufel et al., 2006; Abu-Jbara et al., 2013; Jurgens et al., 2018).”

    From Structural Scaffolds for Citation Intent Classification in Scientific Publications (2019) · cites this paper as Jurgens et al., 2018

    Section 3.1 treats text around a citation—including preceding and following sentences—as evidence of its purpose. Section 3.3 finds that local textual features matter, but also identifies structural and topic features among the highest-weighted features. The paper supports citation context as an important signal, not the unqualified claim that it is the primary signal. (LLM, conf=0.84)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Jurgens et al. (2018) expanded all pre-existing feature-based efforts on citation intent classification by proposing a comprehensive set of engineered features, including bootstrapped patterns, topic modeling, dependency-based, and metadata features.

    “Jurgens et al. (2018) expanded all pre-existing featurebased efforts on citation intent classification by proposing a comprehensive set of engineered features, including boostrapped patterns, topic modeling, dependency-based, and metadata features for the task.”

    From Structural Scaffolds for Citation Intent Classification in Scientific Publications (2019) · cites this paper as Jurgens et al., 2018

    Section 3 and §3.1 describe a citation-classification system with novel bootstrapped patterns and topic-model features; Table 3 lists venue and other field metadata, and the Prototypical Argument Features section describes dependency-path features. The paper says it draws features from several earlier systems, but does not establish that it expanded *all* pre-existing feature-based efforts. (LLM, conf=0.86)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 8

  1. Amjad Abu-Jbara and Dragomir Radev. 2012. Reference scope identification in citing sentences. In Proceed- ings of the 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguis- tics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT), pages 80-90. Association for Computational Linguis- tics.
  2. Awais Athar and Simone Teufel. 2012. Context- enhanced citation sentiment detection. In Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the North American Chap- ter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 597-601. As- sociation for Computational Linguistics.
  3. Steven Bird, Robert Dale, Bonnie J. Dorr, Bryan R. Gib- son, Mark Joseph, Min-Yen Kan, Dongwon Lee, Brett Powley, Dragomir R. Radev, and Yee Fan Tan. 2008. The ACL Anthology Reference Corpus: A Reference Dataset for Bibliographic Research in Computational Linguistics. In Proceedings of International Confer- ence on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC).
  4. Hal Daumé III. 2016. Workshops and mini-conferences, November. https: //nlpers.blogspot.com/2016/11/ workshops-and-mini-conferences.html.
  5. Manuel Fernández-Delgado, Eva Cernadas, Senén Barro, and Dinani Amorim. 2014. Do we need hun- dreds of classifiers to solve real world classification problems? Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), 15(1):3133-3181.
  6. John J. Gumperz. 1982. Discourse strategies, volume 1. Cambridge University Press.
  7. Ellen Riloff and Rosie Jones. 1999. Learning dictionar- ies for information extraction by multi-level bootstrap- ping. In Proceedings of Association for the Advance- ment of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pages 474-479.
  8. John M. Ziman. 1968. Public Knowledge: An Essay Concerning the Social Dimensions of Science. Cam- bridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

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Authors
Jurgens, D., Kumar, S., Hoover, R., McFarland, D., & Jurafsky, D.
Affiliations
  • University of Michigan (US)
  • Stanford University (US)
  • Stanford University,
Corresponding author
  • Jurgens, David
  • Kumar, Srijan
  • Hoover, Raine
  • Jurafsky, Dan
Venue
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Publisher
MIT Press
Published
2018-12
Volume
6
Pages
391-406
ISSN
2307-387X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2808556605
Cited by
212
References
79
Citations by year
2026: 16 · 2025: 25 · 2024: 21 · 2023: 42 · 2022: 34 · 2021: 43 · 2020: 19 · 2019: 12
FWCI
14.11
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion)
Funders
  • National Science Foundation (1633036)
  • Brown Institute for Media Innovation
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 › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Academic Writing and Publishing
Keywords
citation functions, citation analysis, citation counts, field evolution, publication venues, discourse structure, citation classification, natural language processing, disciplinary consensus

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.

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