Diversity in citations to a single study: A citation context network analysis of how evidence from a prospective cohort study was cited

Abstract

Between its origin in the 1950s and its endorsement by a consensus conference in 1984, the diet–heart hypothesis was the object of intense controversy. Paul et al. (1963) is a highly-cited prospective cohort study that reported findings inconvenient for this hypothesis, reporting no association between diet and heart disease; however, many other findings were also reported. By citation context and network analysis of 343 citing papers, I show how Paul et al. was cited in the twenty years after its publication. Generally, different findings were cited by different communities focussing on different risk-factors; communities established by either research foci title terms or via cluster membership as established via modularity maximisation. The most frequently cited findings were the significant associations between heart disease; and serum cholesterol (n=85), blood pressure (n=57), and coffee consumption (n=54). The lack of association between diet and heart disease was cited in just 41 papers. Yet, no single empirical finding was referred to in more than 25% of the citing papers. This raises questions about the value of inferring impact from citation counts alone, and raises problems for studies using such counts to measure citation bias. Peer Review https://publons.com/publon/10.1162/qss_a_00154

Are papers published in predatory journals worthless? A geopolitical dimension revealed by content-based analysis of citations

“…Today, content-based citation analysis is used for many different purposes, from citation recommendation systems to citation sentiment analysis (Hsiao & Schneider, 2022;Leng, 2022;Wang et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2022;Yan et al, 2020;Zhang & Zhu, 2022). The future of content-based citation analysis lies in the work to be done with computational linguistic techniques.…”