Visualizing the context of citations referencing papers published by Eugene Garfield: A new type of keyword co-occurrence analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel bibliometric network type based on citation contexts around Eugene Garfield's papers, revealing semantic relationships that support citation-based research evaluation.

Contribution

It presents a new method for analyzing citation contexts through keyword co-occurrence networks, comparing them with traditional keyword networks to understand semantic relationships.

Findings

Citation contexts are more semantically related to Eugene Garfield's papers than citing papers' titles and abstracts.

Citation context networks reflect cognitive influence in research evaluation.

New network type enhances understanding of citation semantics.

Abstract

During Eugene Garfield's (EG's) lengthy career as information scientist, he published about 1,500 papers. In this study, we use the impressive oeuvre of EG to introduce a new type of bibliometric networks: keyword co-occurrences networks based on the context of citations, which are referenced in a certain paper set (here: the papers published by EG). The citation context is defined by the words which are located around a specific citation. We retrieved the citation context from Microsoft Academic. To interpret and compare the results of the new network type, we generated two further networks: co-occurrence networks which are based on title and abstract keywords from (1) EG's papers and (2) the papers citing EG's publications. The comparison of the three networks suggests that papers of EG and citation contexts of papers citing EG are semantically more closely related to each other than to titles and abstracts of papers citing EG. This result accords with the use of citations in research evaluation that is based on the premise that citations reflect the cognitive influence of the cited on the citing publication.