Citation Context Analysis

Citation context analysis looks past the bare count of citations to ask why and how a work is cited, by reading the text surrounding each in-text reference and classifying its function, sentiment, and content. Where ordinary citation counting treats every reference as an equal vote, this method recognizes that citations differ: some are central to a paper's argument and others merely perfunctory, some confirm a cited finding and others dispute it, some use a method and others only mention a concept. Moravcsik and Murugesan's 1975 study of theoretical physics introduced the now-classic functional distinctions (conceptual versus operational, organic versus perfunctory, evolutionary versus juxtapositional, confirmative versus negational) and found that a large share of citations were perfunctory, casting doubt on citation counts as pure quality measures. Tahamtan and Bornmann's review situates this work within the broader question of what citation counts actually measure.