In-text citation's frequencies-based recommendations of relevant research papers

Abdul Shahid; Muhammad Tanvir Afzal; Abdullah Alharbi; Hanan Aljuaid; Shaha Al-Otaibi

doi:10.7717/peerj-cs.524

In-text citation's frequencies-based recommendations of relevant research papers

PeerJ Comput Sci. 2021 Jun 4:7:e524. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.524. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Abdul Shahid¹, Muhammad Tanvir Afzal², Abdullah Alharbi³, Hanan Aljuaid⁴, Shaha Al-Otaibi⁵

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Computing, Kohat University of Science & Technology, Kohat, Pakistan.
² Department of Computer Science, NAMAL Institute, Mianwali, Pakistan.
³ Department of Information Technology, College of Computers and Information Technology, Taif University, Taif, Saudi Arabia.
⁴ Computer Sciences Department, College of Computer and Information Sciences, Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University (PNU), Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
⁵ Information Systems Department, College of Computer and Information Sciences, Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Abstract

From the past half of a century, identification of the relevant documents is deemed an active area of research due to the rapid increase of data on the web. The traditional models to retrieve relevant documents are based on bibliographic information such as Bibliographic coupling, Co-citations, and Direct citations. However, in the recent past, the scientific community has started to employ textual features to improve existing models' accuracy. In our previous study, we found that analysis of citations at a deep level (i.e., content level) can play a paramount role in finding more relevant documents than surface level (i.e., just bibliography details). We found that cited and citing papers have a high degree of relevancy when in-text citations frequency of the cited paper is more than five times in the citing paper's text. This paper is an extension of our previous study in terms of its evaluation of a comprehensive dataset. Moreover, the study results are also compared with other state-of-the-art approaches i.e., content, metadata, and bibliography. For evaluation, a user study is conducted on selected papers from 1,200 documents (comprise about 16,000 references) of an online journal, Journal of Computer Science (J.UCS). The evaluation results indicate that in-text citation frequency has attained higher precision in finding relevant papers than other state-of-the-art techniques such as content, bibliographic coupling, and metadata-based techniques. The use of in-text citation may help in enhancing the quality of existing information systems and digital libraries. Further, more sophisticated measure may be redefined be considering the use of in-text citations.

Keywords: Citations; Digital Libraries; In-text Citation; Relevant Documents.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by Taif University through the Taif University researchers supporting project (TURSP-2020/231), Taif University, Saudi Arabia. This research was funded by the Deanship of Scientific Research at Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University through the Fast-track Research Funding Program. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.