Which is the cited source? A new perspective on article evaluation based on semantic similarity—Citation contribution attribution

Siluo Yang, Lijuan Wu, Biyao Wu and Yanhui Song

Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 2025, vol. 76, issue 11, 1532-1552

Abstract: Citation analysis, an essential method in bibliometrics and scientometrics, has been widely applied to assess scholarly publications. Traditionally, studies attribute citation contributions directly to cited papers, overlooking indirect citations. Citation cascade research improves on this by assuming papers inherit contributions from their citation generations but does not consider the source of the citation content (CC). We argue that citation contributions should be attributed to the source of the CC, which includes not only the cited paper but also its references. This study introduces a semantic similarity‐driven approach (CCA_SSRS) to allocate citation contributions. CCA_SSRS evaluates semantic similarity between CC in the citing paper (CCFP) and the reference span in the cited paper (RSFP), as well as between CCFP and CCs associated with the cited paper's references (CCFP_R). If similarity between CCFP and CCFP_Ri exceeds or equals that between CCFP and RSFP, the i‐th reference is credited; otherwise, the cited paper receives full credit. Tested on the CL‐SciSumm 2017 dataset, CCA_SSRS outperformed three established methods in identifying implicit cited sources, enabling references to receive varying contributions based on semantic similarity. This study highlights the significant impact of citation contribution attribution on paper evaluation and ranking.

Date: 2025
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