OpenCitations has been established as a community-guided open infrastructure to provide access to global scholarly bibliographic and citation data, with the mission of harvest and openly publish accurate and comprehensive metadata describing the world’s academic publications and the scholarly citations that link them, and to preserve ongoing access to this information by secure archiving. The importance of open citations refers to the open availability of bibliographic citation data, which is a crucial requirement in the fields of bibliometrics and scientometrics for creating reproducible metrics in research assessment exercises.

Bibliographic citation, i.e. referring from a citing entity to the cited one, is one of the most critical activities of an author in producing any bibliographic work. Indeed, acknowledging the sources we use to back our research stands at the very core of the scholarly enterprise. The network of citations created by combining citation information from many academic articles, books, proceedings, etc., is a source of rich information for scholars: a PhD student surveying the literature for her thesis exploits citations to find relevant articles; a senior researcher deepening his research exploits citations to continuously find new material; a reviewer reads citations to understand if the citing works are up-to-date and well-connected to others; a professor writing a project proposal uses citations to spot recent works and helpful links; and several other examples could be listed here. However, the reasons behind such acts of citing are manifold. 

Usually, it is because the author has gained assistance of some sort, perhaps in the form of background information, ideas, methods or data, from the cited previously published works and wishes to acknowledge this. Sometimes, citations may be made because the citing works review, critique or refute previous works. In this seminar, I will introduce existing data models for classifying citation intents (or functions) that we are using as a starting point in the context of the GraspOS project and will briefly show the tool we are developing to extract such citation semantics from scholarly articles in PDF format.

Objectives

• Understanding the different dynamics behind citations
• Exploring ontological models for citation characterisation
• Getting the basics in using a tool for inferring such citation characterisation

Learning Outcomes

At the end of the session, the participant will understand the importance of citation semantics, learn about ontological models dedicated to describing such semantics, and finally be able to use a tool for extracting citation semantics.