All Fingers are not Equal: Intensity of References in Scientific Articles
This work addresses the issue of improving citation-based applications for researchers and evaluators by providing a more nuanced understanding of reference importance, though it is incremental in nature.
The authors tackled the problem of measuring research accomplishment by proposing a method to assess the intensity of references in scientific articles, rather than treating all citations equally, and achieved a 46% better correlation with true labels compared to baselines.
Research accomplishment is usually measured by considering all citations with equal importance, thus ignoring the wide variety of purposes an article is being cited for. Here, we posit that measuring the intensity of a reference is crucial not only to perceive better understanding of research endeavor, but also to improve the quality of citation-based applications. To this end, we collect a rich annotated dataset with references labeled by the intensity, and propose a novel graph-based semi-supervised model, GraLap to label the intensity of references. Experiments with AAN datasets show a significant improvement compared to the baselines to achieve the true labels of the references (46% better correlation). Finally, we provide four applications to demonstrate how the knowledge of reference intensity leads to design better real-world applications.