Research on the Relevancy of Scientific Literature Based on the Citation-Mention Frequency

All papers cite references, but not all citations are equal. This is because references have different citation-mention frequencies. Some references are mentioned only once, while some are mentioned several times. Papers are cited by others when they are relevant to the citing paper. The fact that a reference has a high citation-mention frequency may mean that its content is more closely related to the citing paper. From this point of view, we examined the relevancy of a cited paper to a citing paper on the basis of citation-mention frequency. Two aspects of relevancy are considered: citation linkage and content. We construct a highly mentioned class of references and a rarely mentioned class of references. We introduce the concepts of “reference-similarity” and “content-similarity.” First, we count the number of co-cited references and calculate the reference-similarity. Second, we extract the abstracts of papers and calculate the content-similarity using the bag-of-words model. The results show that references from the highly mentioned class are more relevant to the citing papers than those from the rarely mentioned class.