Citations in Scientific Texts: Do Social Relations Matter?

Béatrice Milard and Ludovic Tanguy

Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 2018, vol. 69, issue 11, 1380-1395

Abstract: This article presents an investigation of the role of social relations in the writing of scientific articles through the study of in‐text citations. Does the fact that the author of an article knows the author whose work he or she cites have an impact on the context of the citation? Because citations are commonly used as criteria for research evaluation, it is important to question their social background to better understand how it impacts textual features. We studied a collection of science articles (N = 123) from 5 disciplines and interviewed their authors (N = 84) to: (a) identify the social relations between citing and cited authors; and (b) measure the correlation between a set of features related to in‐text citations (N = 6,956) and the identified social relations. Our pioneering work, mixing sociological and linguistic results, shows that social relations between authors can partly explain the variations of citations in terms of frequency, position and textual context.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24061

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jinfst:v:69:y:2018:i:11:p:1380-1395

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=2330-1635

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().