Are all literature citations equally important? Automatic citation strength estimation and its applications

Literature citation analysis plays a very important role in bibliometrics and scientometrics, such as the Science Citation Index (SCI) impact factor, h-index. Existing citation analysis methods assume that all citations in a paper are equally important, and they simply count the number of citations. Here we argue that the citations in a paper are not equally important and some citations are more important than the others. We use a strength value to assess the importance of each citation and propose to use the regression method with a few useful features for automatically estimating the strength value of each citation. Evaluation results on a manually labeled data set in the computer science field show that the estimated values can achieve good correlation with human-labeled values. We further apply the estimated citation strength values for evaluating paper influence and author influence, and the preliminary evaluation results demonstrate the usefulness of the citation strength values.