Phys.org May 8, 2024
When a discovery or technique becomes common knowledge, its citations suffer from what Robert Merton called “obliteration by incorporation.” This phenomenon leads to the concept of hidden citations, representing unambiguous textual references to a discovery without an explicit citation to the corresponding manuscript(s). Previous attempts to detect hidden citations have been limited to manually identifying in-text mentions. Researchers at Northeastern University relied on unsupervised interpretable machine learning applied to the full text of each paper to systematically identify hidden citations. They found that for influential discoveries hidden citations outnumber citation counts, emerging regardless of publishing venue and discipline. They showed that the prevalence of hidden citations was not driven by citation counts, but rather by the degree of the discourse on the topic within the text of the manuscripts, indicating that the more discussed was a discovery, the less visible it is to standard bibliometric analysis. Hidden citations indicated that bibliometric measures offered a limited perspective on quantifying the true impact of a discovery, raising the need to extract knowledge from the full text of the scientific corpus… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE