Identifying citation contexts: A review of strategies and goals

Abstract

The Citation Contexts of a cited entity can be seen as little tesserae that, fit together, can be exploited to follow the opinion of the scientific community towards that entity as well as to summarize its most important contents. This mosaic is an excellent resource of information also for identifying topic specific synonyms, indexing terms and citers' motivations, i.e. the reasons why authors cite other works. Is a paper cited for comparison, as a source of data or just for additional info? What is the polarity of a citation? Different reasons for citing reveal also different weights of the citations and different impacts of the cited authors that go beyond the mere citation count metrics. Identifying the appropriate Citation Context is the first step toward a multitude of possible analysis and researches. So far, Citation Context have been defined in several ways in literature, related to different purposes, domains and applications. In this paper we present different dimensions of Citation Context investigated by researchers through the years in order to provide an introductory review of the topic to anyone approaching this subject.