Modelling in engineering: A citation context analysis

Purely quantitative citation measures are widely used to evaluate research grants, to compare the output of researcher or to benchmark universities. The intuition that not all citations are the same, however, can be illustrated by two examples. First, studies have shown that erroneous or controversial papers have higher citation counts. Second, does a high-level citation in an introduction have the same impact as a reference to a paper that serves as a conceptual starting point? Companions to purely quantitative measures are the so-called citation context analyses which aim to obtain a better understanding of the link between citing and cited work. In this article, we propose a classification scheme for citation context analysis in the field of modelling in engineering. The categories were defined based on an extensive literature review and input from experts in the field of modelling. We propose a detailed scheme with six categories (Perfunctory, Background Information, Comparing/Confirming, Critique/Refutation, Inspiring, Using/Expanding) and a simplified scheme with three categories (High-level, Critical Analysis, Extending) that can be used within automatic classification approaches. The results of manually classifying 129 randomly selected citations show that 87% of citations fall into the high-level category. This study confirms that critical citations are not common in written academic discourse, even though criticism is essential for scientific progress and knowledge construction.