Lessons learned : the complexity of accurate identification of in-text citations

Abstract EN

The importance of citations is widely recognized by the scientific community.

Citations are being used in making a number of vital decisions such as calculating impact factor of journals, calculating impact of a researcher (H-Index), ranking universities and research organizations.

Furthermore, citation indexes, along with other criteria, employ citation counts to retrieve and rank relevant research papers.

However, citing patterns and in-text citation frequency are not used for such important decisions.

The identification of in-text citation from a scientific document is an important problem.

However, identification of in-text citation is a tough ask due to the ambiguity between citation tag and content.

This research focuses on in-text citation analysis and makes the following specific contributions such as: Provides detailed in-text citation analysis on 16,000 citations of an online journal, reports different pattern of citations-tags and its in-text citations, and highlights the problems(mathematical ambiguities, wrong allotments, commonality in content,, and string variation) in identifying in-text citations from scientific documents.

The accurate identification of in-text citations will help information retrieval systems, digital libraries, and citation indexes.