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Hidden citations obscure true impact in science
Title / Series / Name
Publication Volume
Publication Issue
Pages
Editors
Keywords
catchphrase
foundational paper
hidden citation
latent Dirichlet allocation
science of science
Multidisciplinary
foundational paper
hidden citation
latent Dirichlet allocation
science of science
Multidisciplinary
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/27115
Abstract
References, the mechanism scientists rely on to signal previous knowledge, lately have turned into widely used and misused measures of scientific impact. Yet, when a discovery becomes common knowledge, citations suffer from obliteration by incorporation. This leads to the concept of hidden citation, representing a clear textual credit to a discovery without a reference to the publication embodying it. Here, we rely on unsupervised interpretable machine learning applied to the full text of each paper to systematically identify hidden citations. We find that for influential discoveries hidden citations outnumber citation counts, emerging regardless of publishing venue and discipline. We show that the prevalence of hidden citations is 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 is a discovery, the less visible it is to standard bibliometric analysis. Hidden citations indicate that bibliometric measures offer 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.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2024-05
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae155