Citation genetic genealogy: a novel insight for citation analysis in scientific literature

Citation relationships are commonly described with citation network or citation graph, but in this article, the author introduced the notion of citation genetic genealogy and apply it in citation analysis. A citing document usually only uses pieces of its cited document, so the author of this article defined these valuable pieces of a scientific document, which carry the information that have been used by its citing documents as its document genes. Besides, with the definition of symbolic information of a scientific document, the conclusion that a citing document inherited the document genes from its references can be drawn. Based on these understandings, citation genetic genealogy is constructed to describe citation relationships. With citation genetic genealogy, it is easy to map the citation relationships, like bibliographic coupling and co-citation, with familiar family relationships and illustrate the inheritance relationships in scientific literatures. Also, citation genetic genealogy may provide an interface between the citation analysis of a document set and the content analysis for each individual document inside this document set.