Temporal Representations of Citations for Understanding the Changing Roles of Scientific Publications

Jiangen He,Chaomei Chen

doi:10.3389/frma.2018.00027

Abstract

Researchers may describe different aspects of past scientific publications in their publications and the descriptions may keep changing in the evolution of science. The diverse and changing descriptions (i.e., citation context) on a publication characterize the impact and contributions of the past publication. In this article, we aim to provide an approach to understanding the changing roles of a publication characterized by its citation context in the full text of publications. We proposed approaches for representing the changing citation context of cited publications in different periods as sequences of vectors by training temporal embedding models. We can utilize the temporal representations to quantify how much the roles of publications changed and interpret how they changed. We also evaluated the performance of three ways of constructing citation context for representation learning. Our study in the biomedical domain shows that our metric on the changes of publication roles is stable at the population level but it can account for the variation of individual publications.

Highlights

The content of a scientific publication cannot be changed once it was published, how other researchers cite and evaluate the publication may keep changing
A relevant intellectual structure characterized by citation network is commonly used as a foundation for analyzing the role of a publication played in scientific dynamics, such as identifying the place where the analyzed publication is in the intellectual structure (Orosz et al, 2016) or the structural alteration caused by the publication (Chen, 2012)
We aim to represent cited articles by their citation contexts, so we focus on the cited articles (CA) which have enough citation context information for representation learning

Summary

Introduction

The content of a scientific publication cannot be changed once it was published, how other researchers cite and evaluate the publication may keep changing. Besides the role of a publications are ever-changing, the role of may be complex because of the varied contributions made the publication, especially the publications contributed to interdisciplinary or fundamental research topics. The changing and complex roles of cited publications can be characterized by their citations and citation contexts. Both citation network and citation context (i.e., the sentences containing in-text citations) can be utilized for analyzing scientific publications (Elkiss et al, 2008). The text of citation contexts were used to characterize publications for various applications, such as publication summarization (Qazvinian et al, 2010), survey article generation (Mohammad et al, 2009), and information retrieval (Huang et al, 2015). Quantitative metric for quantifying the role changes of publications can be derived from

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