A Discussion of citations from the perspective of the contribution of the cited paper to the citing paper

Abstract

To more reasonably allocate a paper's credit, this article argues that both a paper's authors and references contribute to a given paper. Accordingly, we quantitatively represent the proportion of contributions from each author and reference to a paper. A paper's credit can be allocated among its authors and references based on their contributions. All papers carry innate credit because of publication. If cited, they also carry external credit from the citing papers. The proportion of a paper's credit allocated to references can be regarded as a credit output and serves as an input for these references. In this scenario, only the credit assigned to a paper's authors remains as the paper's deserved credit. The credit of papers can be transferred in a direction opposite that of knowledge diffusion. Via this method, the estimate of an individual reference's contribution incorporates content‐based citation analysis, a promising method to differentiate different citations. A paper's deserved credit represents the contribution of the paper's authors to the scientific community via the new knowledge they provide in the paper. Therefore, it is rational to evaluate papers according to their deserved credit, not the credit they carry.

Disclosing the relationship between citation structure and future impact of a publication

“…In this paper, we found that, in the field of computational linguistics, citations from Introduction and Method at the early stage of citation lifetime are particularly important for measuring the future impact of papers. Indeed, papers cited in Introduction tend to serve as illustrating the motivation and research problems (Ding et al, 2013; Lu et al, 2018), and are more likely to be pioneers of research issues or state of the art for the research question, and have thus inspired the author(s) to carry out the research work (Fang, 2018). The papers frequently cited in Method tend to be methodology‐oriented papers (Hu et al, 2013), and are especially important in computational linguistics, as they provide methodological trajectories (Lu et al, 2018).…”

A citation iteration method for publications and scientists evaluation

“…As it was previously mentioned, the half-life parameter (A) is not the same for different disciplines. For publications in the field of mathematics, scholars have made estimations on their half-life (Fang, 2018;Zhong et al, 2011). They reported that publications in this field have a long half-life comparing to others.…”