4 ms·

I found the title nearly incomprehensible, so here's a brief pull quote: > Using Google Scholar (or any other knowledge graph) I can find just about any academ

by JadeNB 4y ago

I found the title nearly incomprehensible, so here's a brief pull quote: > Using Google Scholar (or any other knowledge graph) I can find just about any academic paper. More importantly, it lets me see every paper which references that paper. > Great! I can see if something has been cited lots of times, or very few times. That gives me a weak signal about its "importance". > But it tells me nothing about the sentiment of those citations. > Suppose I've just read (Smith, 2015) and I want to know whether the consensus is that the paper is a work of genius or absolute horseshit. What are my options?

sdenton4 4y ago
The nature of citations are often much more ambiguous, though, and assigning sentiment will often be unhelpful. Background citations are often of the flavor of: "These guys did almost exactly the same thing as us, but due to the minor detail of wanting to get our own work published, we think their work is inferior." Or, "This cited work had a great idea, but due to rush to publish they left out a bunch of details and took a few short cuts on the implementation. We've fixed some of these holes, and called the original authors dolts to elevate the importance of our own incremental improvements."
- jll29 4y ago
  This is correct, however, it does not eliminate the value of citation polarity; citation polarity must be seen relative to the rhetorical zone type in which it occurs: the parent's examples are valid, but typically limited to zone type BACKGROUND ( https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sht25/thesis/t.pdf https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sht25/thesis/t.pdf ), where the related work is described, and often differentiated from one's own work.
  - sdenton4 4y ago
    Yah.... I think this kind of semantic ambiguity and complexity points to 90% of the information content of the citation being the existence of the citation. After all, I wouldn't bother calling someone a dolt if their paper was actually insignificant.
  - jll29 4y ago
    Here's the latest research (including downloadable data if you want to play) about citation polarity: http://jurgens.people.si.umich.edu/citation-function/ http://jurgens.people.si.umich.edu/citation-function/
mattkrause 4y ago
Read the paper; ask someone else who read the paper :-) Your best bet would be to find a review paper that cites Smith (2015) and see how they interpret it and how Smith (2015)'s conclusions jibe with the rest of the review. A few review series even use little icons to indicate "important" and "crucial" papers. Even there, you've got to be careful that you haven't fallen into some weird fringe-y subfield though. Raw bibliometrics aren't totally useless--I'd bet most bad work is ignored, rather than refuted--but I'm really skeptical that anyone can automatically put a valance onto most citations.

by JadeNB 4y ago

sdenton4 4y ago

The nature of citations are often much more ambiguous, though, and assigning sentiment will often be unhelpful. Background citations are often of the flavor of: "These guys did almost exactly the same thing as us, but due to the minor detail of wanting to get our own work published, we think their work is inferior." Or, "This cited work had a great idea, but due to rush to publish they left out a bunch of details and took a few short cuts on the implementation. We've fixed some of these holes, and called the original authors dolts to elevate the importance of our own incremental improvements."

jll29 4y ago
This is correct, however, it does not eliminate the value of citation polarity; citation polarity must be seen relative to the rhetorical zone type in which it occurs: the parent's examples are valid, but typically limited to zone type BACKGROUND ( https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sht25/thesis/t.pdf https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sht25/thesis/t.pdf ), where the related work is described, and often differentiated from one's own work.
- sdenton4 4y ago
  Yah.... I think this kind of semantic ambiguity and complexity points to 90% of the information content of the citation being the existence of the citation. After all, I wouldn't bother calling someone a dolt if their paper was actually insignificant.
- jll29 4y ago
  Here's the latest research (including downloadable data if you want to play) about citation polarity: http://jurgens.people.si.umich.edu/citation-function/ http://jurgens.people.si.umich.edu/citation-function/

mattkrause 4y ago

Read the paper; ask someone else who read the paper :-) Your best bet would be to find a review paper that cites Smith (2015) and see how they interpret it and how Smith (2015)'s conclusions jibe with the rest of the review. A few review series even use little icons to indicate "important" and "crucial" papers. Even there, you've got to be careful that you haven't fallen into some weird fringe-y subfield though. Raw bibliometrics aren't totally useless--I'd bet most bad work is ignored, rather than refuted--but I'm really skeptical that anyone can automatically put a valance onto most citations.