Citation Contexts of Information Science Articles

Identifying, classifying, and analyzing citation contexts of information science articles based on Hyland's meta-discourse approach.

This research was carried out in two phases: "citation class identification" (Jurgens et al., 2016) and "metadiscourse-based analysis of identified function" (Hyland, 2005). 164 citation contexts of 10 citing articles in English (including 656 explicit and implicit sentences) were analyzed.

Based on metadiscourse, citation functions were categorized in 2 classes named "Interactive citations" and "Interactional citations" included 4 sub-classes in the second level, 14 sub-classes in the third level and 23 sub-classes in the forth. Interactive functions were understood more than interactional ones. Moreover, the perceived classes were more descriptive than analytical.

The similarity between the taxonomy perceived in this study and existing citation classification schemes in the literature, is to the third level. In addition, most similarities are in the area of interactive functions. It seems that interactional citations identified in this study could be used to refine citation contexts in scientific information retrieval systems as well as in the process of qualitative evaluation of the impact of research.