Understanding the Changing Roles of Scientific Publications via Citation Embeddings

TL;DR

This paper introduces a temporal embedding approach to analyze how the roles of scientific publications evolve over time through citation contexts, providing insights into their changing impact and contributions.

Contribution

We propose a novel method to represent and quantify the dynamic roles of publications using temporal embeddings trained on citation contexts.

Findings

The role change metric is stable over time at the population level.

The metric significantly distinguishes individual publication roles.

The method offers interpretable insights into publication role evolution.

Abstract

Researchers may describe different aspects of past scientific publications in their publications and the descriptions may keep changing in the evolution of science. The diverse and changing descriptions (i.e., citation context) on a publication characterize the impact and contributions of the past publication. In this article, we aim to provide an approach to understanding the changing and complex roles of a publication characterized by its citation context. We described a method to represent the publications' dynamic roles in science community in different periods as a sequence of vectors by training temporal embedding models. The temporal representations can be used to quantify how much the roles of publications changed and interpret how they changed. Our study in the biomedical domain shows that our metric on the changes of publications' roles is stable over time at the population level but significantly distinguish individuals. We also show the interpretability of our methods by a concrete example.