Elkiss, A; Shen, S; Fader, A; Erkan, G; States, D; Radev, D Blind men and elephants: What do citation summaries tell us about a research article? JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, 59 (1): 51-62 JAN 1 2008

[Eugene Garfield]

Back in the seventies we spoke about “citation abstracts”.  
Bibliographies, Citations, and Citation Abstracts 
http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v2p190y1974-76.pdf

The authors of the following article  call them “citation summaries.”  
They make some interesting proposals for expanding the content of 
traditional author abstracts 

Email Address: radev at umich.edu

Author(s):  Elkiss, Aaron;  Shen, Siwei;  Fader, Anthony); Erkan, Guenes; 
States, David; Radev, Dragomir

Title: Blind men and elephants: What do citation summaries tell us about a 
research article? 

Source: JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND 
TECHNOLOGY, 59 (1): 51-62 JAN 1 2008 

Abstract: The old Asian legend about the blind men and the elephant comes 
to mind when looking at how different authors of scientific papers 
describe a piece of related prior work. It turns out that different 
citations to the same paper often focus on different aspects of that paper 
and that neither provides a full description of its full set of 
contributions. In this article, we will describe our investigation of this 
phenomenon. We studied citation summaries in the context of research 
papers in the biomedical domain. A citation summary is the set of citing 
sentences for a given article and can be used as a surrogate for the 
actual article in a variety of scenarios. It contains information that was 
deemed by peers to be important. Our study shows that citation summaries 
overlap to some extent with the abstracts of the papers and that they also 
differ from them in that they focus on different aspects of these papers 
than do the abstracts. In addition to this, co-cited articles (which are 
pairs of articles cited by another article) tend to be similar. We show 
results based on a lexical similarity metric called cohesion to justify 
our claims. 

Addresses: Univ Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA 

Reprint Address: Elkiss, A, Univ Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA. 

Cited Reference Count: 25 

Times Cited: 0 

Publisher: JOHN WILEY & SONS INC 

Publisher Address: 111 RIVER ST, HOBOKEN, NJ 07030 USA 

ISSN: 1532-2882 

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