Abstract
Abstract The aim of this literature review is to examine the current state of the art in the area of citation classification. In particular, we investigate the approaches for characterizing citations based on their semantic type. We conduct this literature review as a meta-analysis covering 60 scholarly articles in this domain. Although we included some of the manual pioneering works in this review, more emphasis is placed on the later automated methods, which use Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) for analyzing the fine-grained linguistic features in the surrounding text of citations. The sections are organized based on the steps involved in the pipeline for citation classification. Specifically, we explore the existing classification schemes, data sets, preprocessing methods, extraction of contextual and noncontextual features, and the different types of classifiers and evaluation approaches. The review highlights the importance of identifying the citation types for research evaluation, the challenges faced by the researchers in the process, and the existing research gaps in this field.
Highlights
Citation analysis has been a subject of study for several decades with the work of Garfield (1972) being amongst the most pioneering
The existing methods using citation impact indicators like h-index and Journal Impact Factors (JIFs), which are based on citation frequency, have been used alongside the earlier peer-reviewing approaches for research evaluation (Aksnes et al, 2019)
San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)1 released in 2013 includes 18 recommendations for improving research evaluation methods to mitigate the limitations of the citation count based impact assessment methods
Summary
Citation analysis has been a subject of study for several decades with the work of Garfield (1972) being amongst the most pioneering. The existing methods using citation impact indicators like h-index and Journal Impact Factors (JIFs), which are based on citation frequency, have been used alongside the earlier peer-reviewing approaches for research evaluation (Aksnes et al, 2019). According to Garfield (1972), “...citation frequency is, a function of many variables besides scientific merit...” How to weigh such individual factors is still unclear while using citation measures for evaluating research (Garfield, 1979)
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