Computer models for identifying instrumental citations in the biomedical literature

Lawrence D. Fu  Yindalon Aphinyanaphongs  Constantin F. Aliferis

Received: 28 November 2012 / Published online: 27 February 2013

Akade′miai Kiado′, Budapest, Hungary 2013

The most popular method for evaluating the quality of a scientific publication is citation count. This metric assumes that a citation is a positive indicator of the quality of the cited work. This assumption is not always true since citations serve many purposes. As a result, citation count is an indirect and imprecise measure of impact. If instrumental citations could be reliably distinguished from non-instrumental ones, this would readily improve the performance of existing citation-based metrics by excluding the non-instrumental citations. A citation was operationally defined as instrumental if either of the following was true: the hypothesis of the citing work was motivated by the cited work, or the citing work could not have been executed without the cited work. This work investigated the feasibility of developing computer models for automatically classifying citations as instrumental or non-instrumental. Instrumental citations were manually labeled, and

machine learning models were trained on a combination of content and bibliometric features. The experimental results indicate that models based on content and bibliometric features are able to automatically classify instrumental citations with high predictivity (AUC = 0.86). Additional experiments using independent hold out data and prospective validation show that the models are generalizeable and can handle unseen cases. This work demonstrates that it is feasible to train computer models to automatically identify instrumental citations.

研究人员的引用地为非常复杂，有的是正面引用，有的是负面引用，有的是上用观点，有的是引用数据......这篇文章基于以下规则，然后建立语料库，通过构建模型让计算机进行学习，然后利用模型对论文的引用进行区分，进而把引文分为不同类型。

For the purposes of this study, a citation is operationally defined as instrumental if either

of the following rules is true:

1. the hypothesis of the citing work is motivated by the cited work

2. the citing work could not have been executed without the cited work

还没细看细节，觉得这种方式不错，与大家分享。