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  • Chew-Ooi Lian Ping

Meaningful Citations for Research and Impact

The research impact of a publication includes both quantitative and qualitative measurements. Besides the traditional citation counts, the context of citations (ie which part of the citing paper was the citation found) may provide more meaningful data on the research impact.


Here are two tools that provide citation context analysis which are useful to authors and researchers



Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered research tool with over 200 million publication records from published academic articles and preprints. In addition to citation counts of a publication, Semantic Scholar provides context to citations through citation classifications and influence indicators.


Based on the intent of citations, Semantic Scholar classifies the citations into three categories to facilitate navigation and discovery: Background Citations, Methods Citations, and Results Citations.


Semantic Scholar also identifies influential papers defined as Highly Influential Citations. These influential citations indicate that the cited publication has a significant impact on the citing papers.


Influential citations are determined utilising a machine-learning model analysing a number of factors, including the number of citations to a publication, and the surrounding context for each.

As classification of citations and identification of influential papers depend on mining of data from the full text of citing papers, the availability of citation contexts is limited to citing papers that Semantic Scholar has access to.



The 11 excerpts indicate how the cited publication, Voices from the ground: The emotional labour of English teachers' work, has a significant impact on the citing paper, Research on Language Teachers’ Emotion Labour and Emotional Well-being.



Web of Science Core Collection is a citation database that provides access to over 85 million publication records. It is now offering Enriched Cited References in selected publication records to provide context to cited references.


This new feature classifies in-text mentions (cited references) into five categories: Background, Basis, Discuss, Support and Differ.


It also provides a visualisation that shows where and how the references were cited: the location (x axis) and the classification (y axis) of the in-text mentions. Hover over the black points in the visualisation and click “View in-text mentions” button of the selected reference to show how the reference was cited.


New Enriched Cited References section provide visualisations of where and how references are cited.


For this example, there were two mentions of the cited reference. The first mention was classified as Background in the Introduction Section and the second mention was classified as Basis in the Methods Section.





Additional contexts that are helpful in evaluation of publications for research include the number of times a reference was cited within the publication, which indicates the impact of the reference to the author, and the proximity of cited references, which shows the relation of these references.


Source: Clarivate


Use Cases


The citation contexts provided by Semantic Scholar are useful for assessing the impact of a publication whilst the enriched cited references provided by Web of Science are useful for evaluating related publications for research.


Resources and Sharing Sessions


For other features of Semantic Scholar such as claiming of your Author Page, setting up of your Library and Alerts, and creation of AI-powered Research Feeds, please refer to the FAQs and tutorials.


To book a sharing session on Semantic Scholar/Web of Science or resources/tools related to author identity management, research metrics and scholarly visibility, please contact the Library’s Scholarly Communication Unit at libscomm@nie.edu.sg.

Acknowledgement


We thank A/P Loh Chin Ee for granting use of her publication records.


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