Towards the nature of citations

Citation Analysis has a long tradition in information science where it is a subfield of bibliometrics, now often called scientometrics or informetrics. Since its inception, when Eugene Garfield set up the Science Citation Index at the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in 1960, citation counts have matured towards a serious means of assessment for the impact of scholarly work. Along with their application grew the criticism about the quality of simple counts and various attempts were made to examine the citation content or context for getting deeper insight into the development and transfer of scientific knowledge. Several methods have since been employed for examination and classification of citations with respect to their function. With this paper we propose cue verbs (verbs within the citation function) to be highly supportive in understanding the citation relation and with it the knowledge acquisition process. Cue words have been categorized into classes, but they could be organized ontologically in multiple dimensions. A better understanding of the citation function will thus be the seed for a citation ontology, which we consider extremely useful for machine learning tasks, and in areas such as knowledge engineering and information system design.