Identifying and Capturing the Semantic Aspects of Citations

Abstract

This dissertation presents new work in understanding the nature of citations, their potential different purposes and how they are used. This research addresses a fundamental question: ‘Should all citations be treated equally?’ It explores the concept of influential citations and examines key features for their identification. It then investigates the key challenges in capturing these semantic aspects of citations and then presents solutions that overcome current limitations in the domain. The dissertation provides an overview of current bibliometrics that use raw citation counts and then details the problems associated with these methodologies. It then presents an overview of two areas in which bibliometrics and citation data are already being applied: information retrieval and research evaluation. The first study (Chapter 3) focuses on the second of these areas, the use of citation data in research evaluation; it is the largest investigation to date into the correlation between peer review and bibliometrics at the institutional / discipline level, using data from the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF2014). This study was the first to identify strong correlations between simple citation-based indicators and aggregate peer review results in approximately one third of domains covered by the REF2014 process, notably those domains in which the peer review panels used citation data to inform their peer review decisions. There is already wide-scale usage of bibliometrics and…