Two years of explicit CiTO annotations

Abstract

Citations are an essential aspect of research communication and have become the basis of many evaluation metrics in the academic world. Some see citation counts as a mark of scientific impact or even quality, but in reality the reasons for citing other work are manifold which makes the interpretation more complicated than a single citation count can reflect. Two years ago, the Journal of Cheminformatics proposed the CiTO Pilot for the adoption of a practice of annotating citations with their citation intentions. Basically, when you cite a journal article or dataset (or any other source), you also explain why specifically you cite that source. Particularly, the agreement and disagreement and reuse of methods and data are of interest. This article explores what happened after the launch of the pilot. We summarize how authors in the Journal of Cheminformatics used the pilot, shows citation annotations are distributed with Wikidata, visualized with Scholia, discusses adoption outside BMC, and finally present some thoughts on what needs to happen next.

Fig. 1

Screenshot of the citation statements for an article where the objective of project or action qualifier is used to annotate the citation with their CiTO intentions

Fig. 2

Screenshot of the Scholia Citation Typing Ontology page showing the daily statistics

Fig. 3

Citation network consisting only of citations annotated with [cito:usesMethodIn]. Articles with explicit CiTO annotation are shown in red. The Wikidata SPARQL query used to create this diagram is available from https://gist.github.com/egonw/1c8bc99373a24075838ee19976c74856

Fig. 4

Screenshot of the “Most reused articles” section of the Scholia page for the Journal of Cheminformatics. Based on CiTO annotation available in Wikidata, the ten most reused articles are shown