Marc Bertin

The invariant distribution of references in scientific articles

The organization of scientific papers typically follows a standardized pattern, the well‐known IMRaD structure (introduction, methods, results, and discussion). Using the full text of 45,000 papers published in the PLoS series of journals as a case study, this paper investigates, from the viewpoint of bibliometrics, how references are distributed along the structure of scientific papers as well as the age of these cited references. Once the sections of articles are realigned to follow the IMRaD sequence, the position of cited references along the text of articles is invariant across all PLoS journals, with the introduction and discussion accounting for most of the references. It also provides evidence that the age of cited references varies by section, with older references being found in the methods and more recent references in the discussion. These results provide insight into the different roles citations have in the scholarly communication process.

The linguistic patterns and rhetorical structure of citation context: an approach using n-grams

AbstractUsing the full-text corpus of more than 75,000 research articles published by seven PLOS journals, this paper proposes a natural language processing approach for identifying the function of citations. Citation contexts are assigned based on the frequency of n-gram co-occurrences located near the citations. Results show that the most frequent linguistic patterns found in the citation contexts of papers vary according to their location in the IMRaD structure of scientific articles. The presence of negative citations is also dependent on this structure. This methodology offers new perspectives to locate these discursive forms according to the rhetorical structure of scientific articles, and will lead to a better understanding of the use of citations in scientific articles.n

On the composition of scientific abstracts

Purpose – Scientific abstracts reproduce only part of the information and the complexity of argumentation in a scientific article. The purpose of this paper provides a first analysis of the similarity between the text of scientific abstracts and the body of articles, using sentences as the basic textual unit. It contributes to the understanding of the structure of abstracts. Design/methodology/approach – Using sentence-based similarity metrics, the authors quantify the phenomenon of text re-use in abstracts and examine the positions of the sentences that are similar to sentences in abstracts in the introduction, methods, results and discussion structure, using a corpus of over 85,000 research articles published in the seven Public Library of Science journals. Findings – The authors provide evidence that 84 percent of abstract have at least one sentence in common with the body of the paper. Studying the distributions of sentences in the body of the articles that are re-used in abstracts, the authors show t...

Extraction and Characterization of Citations in Scientific Papers

We propose a hybrid method for the extraction and characterization of citations in scientific papers using machine learning combined with rule-based approaches. Our protocol consists of the extraction of metadata, bibliography parsing, section titles processing, and find-grained semantic annotation on the sentence level of texts. This allows us to generate Linked Open Data from a set of research papers in XML.

Semantic Facets for Scientific Information Retrieval

We present an Information Retrieval System for scientific publications that provides the possibility to filter results according to semantic facets. We use sentence-level semantic annotations that identify specific semantic relations in texts, such as methods, definitions, hypotheses, that correspond to common information needs related to scientific literature. The semantic annotations are obtained using a rule-based method that identifies linguistic clues organized into a linguistic ontology. The system is implemented using Solr Search Server and offers efficient search and navigation in scientific papers.

The context of multiple in-text references and their signification

In this paper, we consider sentences that contain multiple in-text references (MIR) and their position in the rhetorical structure of articles. We carry out the analysis of MIR in a large-scale dataset of about 80,000 research articles published by the Public Library of Science in 7 journals. We analyze two major characteristics of MIR: their positions in the IMRaD structure of articles and the number of in-text references that make up a MIR in the different journals. We show that MIR are rather frequent in all sections of the rhetorical structure. In the Introduction section, sentences containing MIR account for more than half of the sentences with references. We examine the syntactic patterns that are most used in the contexts of both multiple and single in-text references and show that they are composed, for the most part, of noun groups. We point out the specificity of the Methods section in this respect.