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The bibliography at the end of a scientific publication, links from one
World Wide Web page to another, references in a legal brief to prior
judicial opinions, and CONVERSATIONAL THREADS connecting postings
to one another within a common Usenet group may seem completely
unrelated. In each case, however, the author of one document has found
it useful to cite another document. Perhaps it is because the author
wishes to extend a prior scientific or legal argument, or perhaps it is
to attack it. It may be to pull together disjointed Web pages into a
single ``home page'' theme. Or the citation may be designed to quiet a
bunch of ``newby'' Newsgroup discussion by alerting them to a FAQ
(frequently asked question) answer. In all cases, a new piece of text is
being woven into the larger fabric of other texts, uniting one author's
contribution into the legacy of many others'. The value citations can
offer in supporting the FOA activity has been recognized by many [REF1072] [Salton79] , and lead to methods that
allow users to capture and organize their own bibliographic materials
[REF407] . As more and more scientific
publishing moves to open, electronic repositories, efforts such as the
Open Citation
Project are leading the way towards new standards for the exchange
of this important information.
At its core a citation is a pointer, from
a document to a document. (figure) A. We typically think of one
a citation pointing from one document to another document of the same
type: Scientific papers cite other journal articles, Email messages
refer to prior messages, HTML pages point to one another. But in today's
quickly changing scene, it is not uncommon to find heterogeneous forms
of citation, from one document type to another as shown in Figure
(FOAref) B. For many publications, citations are collected at
the very end of a document, in its bibliography. Often the real locus of
a citation, however, is a someplace earlier in the paper, and many
compositional styles insert an expicit bibliographic citation there. We
will be interested in the CITATION RESOLUTION of both ends of the
pointer: how accurately do we know the location of the citation in the
citing paper, and how precisely is its pointer into the cited paper?
Does it point to a particular paragraph, page, section, or just the
entire document.
The application of very similar citation mechanism has
been exploited in much different ways in different contexts. Figure
(figure) summarizes a number of dimensions across several
contexts. Here we consider citation as exemplified in two particular
classes of documents, generated by Science and by Law, which have
supported social activities for a very long time. Section §6.1.5 then reports on new analyses of
citation patterns observed on the WWW.
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Citation: inter-document links
Subsections