GraspOS online training
Citations and their meaning – or why we cite
23 July 2024, 14:00-15:00 CEST
Bibliographic citation, i.e. referring from a citing entity to the cited one, is one of the most critical activities of an author in producing any bibliographic work. Indeed, acknowledging the sources we use to back our research stands at the very core of the scholarly enterprise.
The network of citations created by combining citation information from many academic articles, books, proceedings, etc., is a source of rich information for scholars: a PhD student surveying the literature for her thesis exploits citations to find relevant articles; a senior researcher deepening his research exploits citations to continuously find new material; a reviewer reads citations to understand if the citing works are up-to-date and well-connected to others; a professor writing a project proposal uses citations to spot recent works and helpful links; and several other examples could be listed here.
However, the reasons behind such acts of citing are manifold. Usually, it is because the author has gained assistance of some sort, perhaps in the form of background information, ideas, methods or data, from the cited previously published works and wishes to acknowledge this. Sometimes, citations may be made because the citing works review, critique or refute previous works. In this seminar, I will introduce existing data models for classifying citation intents (or functions) that we are using as a starting point in the context of the GraspOS project and will briefly show the tool we are developing to extract such citation semantics from scholarly articles in PDF format.
Training Objectives:
- Understand the different dynamics behind citations
- Explore ontological models for citation characterisation
- Get the basics in using a tool for inferring such citation characterisation
Learning outcomes
At the end of the session, the participant will understand the importance of citation semantics, learn about ontological models dedicated to describing such semantics, and finally be able to use a tool for extracting citation semantics.
