A Case Study of the Epistemic Function of Citations - Implications for Citation-based Science Mapping

The use of citations as indicators of topical relatedness of publications is common in the algorithmic mapping of the structure of science. References to source documents, however, may serve a variety of epistemic functions, and hence represent rather different dimensions of topical relatedness. They may pertain to the research methods used, the empirical objects studied, the theoretical resources build on, the research questions pursued, or the external motivation for and relevance of the work. In this case study, we explore the diversity in topical dimensions along which publications are linked in citation networks, by coding the epistemic function of in-text citations. To construct an informative sample of publications, we first made a quality assessment of an existing field delineation of invasion biology and identified the core and the boundary of the field. We then sampled 9 publications from each layer to analyze the epistemic functions of citations. Our preliminary results for the core layer show the diversity of epistemic functions that underlie in-text citations and suggest substantial variation between studies. While current approaches to science mapping use citation links as generic indicators of relatedness, future algorithmic extractions that distinguish between epistemic functions of citations might greatly enrich science mapping.