Citation Count Is Not Enough: Citation’s Context-Based Scientific Impact Evaluation

Qualitative analysis of citations received by a scientific manuscript is a challenging task in the field of citation analysis. In most cases, the existing approaches that involve citations for the scientific impact evaluation normally employ a quantitative parameter, such as the number of received citations, while ignoring the qualitative feature, such as the context of citations, while, in reality, a received citation might hold positive feedback and negative or neutral feedback. In this study, a measure is purposed for the scientific evaluation of the articles based on the context of the citations named the context-based article impact factor (CBAIF). CBAIF not only considers the positive, negative, or neutral context of the citations but also involves the citing and cited author’s conflict-of-interest relationship for the evaluation of their scientific impact. With the help of experimentation, it is observed that CBAIF performs a fair ranking of articles based on citation’s context, whether it is cited positively or being criticized by some authors. Experimental results show that the CBAIF value with the context of citations revealed accurate results rather than the article impact factor (AIF) value without the context of citations.