A Proposed Method for Residual Citation Allocation Based on Citation Contexts’ Similarity

Abstract

This article proposes an approach for allocating residual citations to scientific publications and demonstrating this proposed approach with a sample of biomedical publications. Residue citations (i.e., citations that are lost due to citation practices termed “Obliteration by Incorporation” and the “Palimpsestic Syndrome”) in consequent citations in the second, third or nth generations are then reconstituted. The proposed approach takes into account citation contexts (i.e., the contribution of a cited publication) for allocating residual citation. The proposed method for allocating residual citation is based on the similarity between the citation contexts of a publication and those of its nth generation citations in their n+1th generation citations. The proposed method was demonstrated using a sample with ten base articles and their five generations of citations, from which 5,272 citation context pairs were obtained. The proposed indirect citation weighting was compared with the existing cascading citation weighting method using one T-test. Statistical tests were also performed to understand the differences in the residual citations from one generation to the other. Like the cascading citation system, residual citations from articles to their generations of citations decreased as the number of generations increased. However, residue citations accrued to publications at all the generations were statistically different between the proposed residual citation and the cascading citation system. This study proposes a method for assessing scientific communication based on the contribution of scientific publications beyond the conventional direct citation.