Understanding the Changing Roles of Scientific Publications via Citation Embeddings
This work addresses the need to track and interpret the evolving impact of scientific publications for researchers and bibliometric analysts, though it is incremental as it builds on existing embedding techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of understanding how the roles of scientific publications evolve over time by analyzing citation contexts, and they developed a method using temporal embeddings to quantify and interpret these changes, showing that their metric is stable at the population level but distinguishes individual publications in the biomedical domain.
Researchers may describe different aspects of past scientific publications in their publications and the descriptions may keep changing in the evolution of science. The diverse and changing descriptions (i.e., citation context) on a publication characterize the impact and contributions of the past publication. In this article, we aim to provide an approach to understanding the changing and complex roles of a publication characterized by its citation context. We described a method to represent the publications' dynamic roles in science community in different periods as a sequence of vectors by training temporal embedding models. The temporal representations can be used to quantify how much the roles of publications changed and interpret how they changed. Our study in the biomedical domain shows that our metric on the changes of publications' roles is stable over time at the population level but significantly distinguish individuals. We also show the interpretability of our methods by a concrete example.