Re-citation Analysis: A Promising Method for Improving Citation Analysis for Research Evaluation, Knowledge Network Analysis, Knowledge Representation and Information Retrieval

Citation analysis is used in research evaluation exercises around the globe, directly affecting the lives of millions of researchers and the expenditure of billions of dollars. It is therefore crucial to seriously address the problems and limitations that plague it. Central amongst critiques of the common practice of citation analysis has long been that it treats all citations equally, be they crucial to the citing paper or perfunctory. Weighting citations by their value to the citing paper has long been proposed as a theoretically promising solution to this problem. Recitation analysis proposes to tune out the large percentage of perfunctory citations in a paper and tune in on crucial ones when performing citation analysis, by ignoring uni-citations (mentioned just once in a paper) and counting and analyzing only re-citations (used again and again in a citing paper). By focusing on core connections in knowledge networks, re-citation analysis can help research evaluation become more sensitive to the distinction between essential and perfunctory impact of research. It may benefit citation-link based knowledge representation and retrieval systems with improved precision by better capturing "aboutness" of articles, the essence of subject indexing in knowledge representation and retrieval, rather than merely providing "relatedness" information.