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Citations in Scientific Texts: Do Social Relations Matter?
Author(s) -
Milard Béatrice,
Tanguy Ludovic
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.24061
Subject(s) - citation , set (abstract data type) , context (archaeology) , sociology , social science , cites , social relation , epistemology , linguistics , computer science , library science , history , philosophy , archaeology , programming language , fishery , biology
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.