Lessons Learned: The Complexity
of Accurate Identification of in-Text Citations
Abdul Shahid, Muhammad Afzal and Muhammad Abdul
Qadir
Department of Computer Science, Mohammad Ali Jinnah
University, Pakistan
Abstract: 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.
Keywords: In-text citation analysis, citation frequency,
citation tag, in-text citation patterns, digital library
Received June 27, 2013; accepted March 19, 2014