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.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Moravcsik, M. J., & Murugesan, P. (1975). Some Results on the Function and Quality of Citations. Social Studies of Science, 5(1), 86-92. · DOI 10.1177/030631277500500106
- Tahamtan, I., & Bornmann, L. (2019). What do citation counts measure? An updated review of studies on citations in scientific documents published between 2006 and 2018. Scientometrics, 121(3), 1635-1684. · DOI 10.1007/s11192-019-03243-4
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.