Shodh Sari-An International Multidisciplinary Journal
Vol-05, Issue-03 (Jul-Sep 2026)
An International scholarly/ academic journal, peer-reviewed/ refereed journal, ISSN : 2959-1376
From Counts to Context: Functional Citation Analysis of International Journal of Information Management
M, Soujanya1, K, Sandra M2 and A, Rupesh Kumar3
1Guest Librarian, Government First Grade College, Banavara, Hassan, India
2UGC Junior Research Fellow, Department of Studies and Research in Library and Information Science, Tumkur University, Tumakuru, India
3Associate Professor, Department of Studies and Research in Library and Information Science, Tumkur University, Tumakuru, India
Abstract
International Journal of Information Management is the most influential journal in the field of Library and Information Science with highest Journal Impact Factor in the subject field. The present study investigated the contextual pattern of citations accrued by the top 100 highly cited articles published in the journal to understand the actual impact of scholarly writings in LIS.
The contextual data for the study was collected from the Web of Science (WoS) database using the enriched cited references. The bibliographic details of the top 100 highly cited articles were exported. Further, 18478 classified citations under the categories “Background”, “Basis”, “Support”, “Differ” and “Discuss” displayed at article level were recorded. The top 100 highly cited publications collectively gathered 66193 citations, of which 18478 (27.9%) citations were further classified based on the citation function. 65.5% of the enriched citations were grouped as “background” indicating the authors mostly cite a paper to establish thematic framework for the study. 0.20% “differ” citations indicates the meagre scientific discord and 3.3% “support” citations specifies the scientific concord associated with LIS research. The prominence of established research design is visible with the 10.4% “basis” citations. Citation analysis is a prominent technique to evaluate the research impact. Conventional citation techniques lack the ability to disclose the author’s intent in citing a paper. It is essential to understand the purpose of citing a paper, and this can be examined through contextual citation analysis. Our illustrative investigation examined the most influential LIS journal to reveal the actual impact induced by the publications. All citations do not share equal importance; hence they should be weighed based on merit. Contextual citation analysis should be explored further to unleash the real influence of citations.
Keywords: Citation context analysis, Library and Information Science, Functional citations, IJIM
About Author
Ms. Soujanya M is a Guest Librarian at Government First Grade College, Banavara, Hassan, Karnataka. She holds post graduate degree in LIS from Tumkur University, Tumakuru, Karnataka and has qualified Karnataka State Eligibility Test (KSET). Her areas of interest include Citation context analysis, Scientific productivity analysis and research impact metrics. Her contributions to the study are: data collection, analysis and drafting of the manuscript.
Ms. Sandra M K is a UGC Junior Research Fellow in the Department of Studies and Research in Library and Information Science, Tumkur University, Tumakuru, Karnataka. Her areas of interest include Digital humanities, Citation Context Analysis and Scientific productivity analysis. Her contributions to the study are: Review of literature, data analysis and interpretation.
Dr. Rupesh Kumar A is an Associate Professor in the Department of Studies and Research in Library and Information Science, Tumkur University, Tumakuru, Karnataka. His areas of interest include Citation Context Analysis, Research evaluation, Digital Humanities and Webometrics. His contributions to the study are: conceptualization, formulation of objectives, research design, inferencing and finalization of the manuscript.
Impact Statement
This study on contextual citation analysis of top-ranked Library and Information Science (LIS) journal (International Journal of Information Management) provides deeper insight into how and why citations are used in scholarly communication. By going beyond citation counts, it highlights the functional role of citations in knowledge construction, evaluation, and dissemination. The findings can help researchers, librarians, and policymakers better understand citation behaviour, improve research evaluation practices, and reduce reliance on purely quantitative metrics. Additionally, the study contributes to enhancing the quality and transparency of scholarly writing by promoting more meaningful and responsible citation practices. Contextual citation analysis has the potential to be extended across different subjects, authors, and institutions, thereby offering broader implications for understanding citation practices across disciplines.
Cite This Article
APA Style (7th Edition): M, S., K, S. M., & A, R. K. (2026). From counts to context: Functional citation analysis of international journal of information management. Shodh Sari: An International Multidisciplinary Journal, 5(3), 333–342. https://doi.org/10.59231/SARI7959
MLA Style (9th Edition): M, Soujanya, Sandra M K, and Rupesh Kumar A. “From Counts to Context: Functional Citation Analysis of International Journal of Information Management.” Shodh Sari: An International Multidisciplinary Journal, vol. 05, no. 03, 2026, pp. 333–342, doi:https://doi.org/10.59231/SARI7959.
Chicago Manual of Style (17th Edition): M, Soujanya, Sandra M K, and Rupesh Kumar A. 2026. “From Counts to Context: Functional Citation Analysis of International Journal of Information Management.” Shodh Sari: An International Multidisciplinary Journal 5, no. 3 (July): 333–342. https://doi.org/10.59231/SARI7959.
Page Numbers: 333–342
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59231/SARI7959
Subject: Library and Information Science, Bibliometrics, Information Management, and Scientometrics.
Received: Apr 15, 2026
Accepted: May 27, 2026
Published: Jul 01, 2026
Thematic Classification: Functional Citation Analysis, Library and Information Science (LIS), Web of Science (WoS), Enriched Cited References, Citation Function Mapping, Scientific Impact Assessment, Background Citations, Evaluative Bibliometrics, Intellectual Structure, Academic Literature Evaluation.
Introduction
Citations are considered as academic credit. Consequently, citation analysis is a dominant technique for research impact assessment. The idea of quantifying citations to understand the impact of scholarly writings was popularized by Eugene Garfieldby introducing Science citation index in 1964. Later scholars adopted citation analysis as an easy and effective tool to measure the impact of scientific writings. There are substantial number of citation studies (Meyer & Spencer, 1996; Schoonbaert & Roelants, 1996; Small, 1981; Uzunboylu et al., 2011) that explored the pattern of citations across different subject domains. Further, Citations are widely used as an impact tracker, book mark and intellectual heritage (Kostoff, 1998). Despite its many advantages, citations and traditional citation analysis has several drawbacks. All the citations are treated equally in the conventional approach without considering the its function. A citation can be positive, negative or neutral (Kostoff, 1998), thus treating them as equal will lead to inaccuracy in measuring research impact.
The need for classifying citations based on the purpose of citing a paper gained the attention of scholars. Recently Web of Science (Citation Function Class, 2025) and Semantic scholar (Cohan et al., 2019) has been started to classify citations based on intent to help the scholars to understand the relation between cited and citing paper. The present study investigates the polarity-based distribution of citations across publications in the top ranked LIS journal, International Journal of Information Management. We made use of Web of Science citation function class to identify the context-based distribution of citations. Citation context analysis is complementary tool to conventional citation analysis to enhance the accuracy of research impact assessment.
Literature Review
Citation is the practice of quoting others’ ideas, thoughts, and concepts in scholarly writing. It acknowledges an individual’s work and helps readers to trace the original source of information. Proper citation also lends scientific credibility and prestige to the work(Bahadoran et al., 2020).Hence citation analysis is a prominent tool to evaluate research impact, to construct quantitative research metrics indicators and to quantify science and technology research outputs (Moed, 2009). Despite the advantages, traditional citation analysis has been criticized for several drawbacks. Mainlyall the citations are treated as equal merit and there exists systemic biases that effects the aggregate result (Kostoff, 1998). These major challenges results in giving an aerated image about the research impact.
If a paper’s reputation is calculated purely based on the number of citations accrued, then it will lead to the promotion of inaccurate and controversial information irrespective of their importance (Alvarez & Gomez, 2016). Hence it is very important to classify citations based on the intent. Citation background (Dong & Schäfer, 2011), citing behaviour (Bornmann & Daniel, 2008), and context of citation(Wang et al., 2019) helps to differentiate the purpose of citing a paper. Considering all citation as a reward ignore the actual purpose of citing a paper. In scholarly writing an author may express agreement or disagreement with the with the cited work. A study conducted by Worrall and Cohn (2023)states that a citation can be either favourable or critical. Thus, there exists a need to differentiate citations based on the context in which a paper is cited. This novel approach of analysing classified citations is popularly known as Citation Context Analysis (CCA). Contextual citation analysis is a technique that classifies citations based on its function by analysing the text surrounding it (Cronin, 1984). CCA is not an alternative to traditional citation analysis but a complementary technique designed to enhance the accuracy of traditional citation-based metrics.
Classified Citations in Web of Science (WoS)
Semantic classification of citations is a challenging task. It can be done with the help of machine learning and natural language processing (Kunnath et al., 2021). Recently Clarivate introduced enriched cited references in the Web of Science database which classifies citations into “Background”, “Basis”, “Differ”, “Support” and “Discuss” (Donner et al., 2025). The enriched cited references are designed to capture the authors intent in citing a paper.
WoS defines 5 functional citation classes as follows; (Citation Function Class, 2025)
Background citations: Citations that orients the present study within the existing subject domain. Usually appears in the introduction section, but not limited to it.
Basis Citations: Reports the datasets, methods and techniques cited from a document
Discuss citations: Citations that express the relationship between the results of cited and citing document
Support citations: Citations that explicitly express research agreements
Differ Citations: Citations that explicitly express research disagreements
Objectives
To understand the distribution of publications and citations across the top 100 highly cited publications in International Journal of Information Management.
To analyse the context-based citations received by the impactful publications
To explore the chronological trend in contextual citation patterns.
Methodology
The present study aimed to understand the citation dynamics associated with the top 100 articles published in the International Journal of Information Management. We used Web of Science database to gather the contextual citation data. Clarivate has started to provide contextual citation data in the Web of Science database for many citing papers at article level (Donner et al., 2025). We used the same feature to identify the citation function. The journal articles were identified using the advance query SO= International journal of information management. The necessary bibliographic details of the top 100 highly cited papers were exported. Further the contextual citation data was collected by visiting each articles profile. The data was analysed using MS Excel and visualized with the help of Tableau public.
Data Analysis and Interpretation
Chronological Distribution of Publications and Citations
The top 100 highly cited articles in the International Journal of Information Management together garnered 66193 citations. 2020 produced highest number of influential publications (21) followed by 2019 (19) and 2018 (9). There exists a gradual increase in the number of impactful articles disseminated through the LIS journal. Recent publications holding higher concentration of citations indicates emerging trend in LIS research and the scholar’s tendency to cite contemporary research rather focusing on earlier published works. 2019 ranked first with 11498 citations followed by 2020 (10659) and 2021 (8339). The average citation per publication is 661.93.
Table 1: Chronological distribution of publications and citations
Contextual Citation analysis: Web of Science classified 18478citations (27.9% of total citations) into different categories based on the purpose of citing a paper. 72.1% citations were unclassified. 11561 citations were grouped as “background “indicating the importance of research published through the international journal of information management in underlying the fundamental and conceptual base for library and information science. Background citations showcase the theoretical or conceptual foundation used to draw the research outline. The dense concentration of background citations prove that scholars mostly cite paper to define or introduce their current study and to fit them in the existing knowledge domain. 4351 citations were grouped as “discuss” indicating the relation between the result discussed in the current research and cited work. The prominence of established research design is visible with the 1921 “basis” citations. 37 “differ” citations indicates the meagre scientific discord and 608 “support” citations specifies the scientific concord associated with LIS research.
Figure 1: Context wise distribution of Citations
Chronological Distribution of Contextual Citations
Year-wise distribution of contextual citations is displayed in Table 3. Highest number of background citations were garnered by the publications in 2019 (2481) followed by 2020 (2184). This specifies that the publications act as a subject foundation for the upcoming research. The year 2019 ranked first with highest number of support citations, while publications in 2014 accrued highest number of differ citations (8). The number of supporting and contrasting citations were meagre compared to other citation categories indicating the neutral approach followed by scholars in citing a paper. Publications from 2018 to 2021 exhibits a domination in all 5 citation categories. Hence it affirms that research engagement on recent LIS scholarly literature is higher than that of early published works. Further it points out the growth of subject domain.
Table 2: Chronological distribution of contextual citations
Conclusion
Citation analysis is a popular tool used for research evaluation. Traditional citation analysis techniques lack the ability to understand the authors view in citing a paper. Hence the overreliance on quantity conceals the actual quality of a research writing. This limitation of citation analysis can be eliminated by incorporating the purpose of citing a paper. Contextual citation analysis redefines the research impact by corroborating the context or function of a citation. Hence citation context analysis goes beyond citations to measure the real impact of research. The present study solely focuses on the top ranked LIS journal, the international journal of Information Management. We found that all citations do not share equal importance; hence they
should be weighed based on merit. Citation context analysis should be extended further into Subject, Institutional and Author level.
Statements & Declarations
Peer-Review Method: This article underwent a double-blind peer-review process involving external experts in the fields of Scientometrics, Evaluative Bibliometrics, and Scholarly Communication Systems.
Competing Interests: The authors Soujanya M, Sandra M K, and Rupesh Kumar A declare that they have no competing interests, financial, institutional, personal, or otherwise, that could have inappropriately influenced or biased the research framework, statistical mapping, or final conclusions of this manuscript.
Funding: This research received no external funding, corporate sponsorships, or specific institutional grants from any commercial, private, or non-profit sectors.
Data Availability: The bibliometric data parameters, functional citation percentages, Web of Science export summaries, and cross-tabulations analyzed in this study are available within the sections of the article. Any additional analytical mapping models or raw metadata logs are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Licence: From Counts to Context: Functional Citation Analysis of International Journal of Information Management © 2026 by Soujanya M, Sandra M K, and Rupesh Kumar A is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. This work is published by ICERT.
Ethics Approval: This study adopts an evaluative and empirical bibliometric methodology drawing exclusively from secondary metadata records hosted on public and institutional citation indexes. It complied with standard academic ethics and research reporting guidelines of Tumkur University, Tumakuru, Karnataka, India.
Authors’ Contributions: Soujanya M contributed in data collection, analysis and drafting of the manuscript. Sandra M K contributed in review of literature, data analysis and interpretation. Rupesh Kumar contributed in conceptualization, formulation of objectives, research design, inferencing and finalization of the manuscript. They were collectively responsible for designing the functional citation taxonomy, querying and exporting the Web of Science database records, contextualizing the patterns of academic impact, and refining the final comprehensive manuscript.
References
Alvarez, M., & Gomez, J. M. (2016). Survey about citation context analysis: Tasks, techniques, and resources. Natural Language Engineering, 22(3), 327–349. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1351324915000388
Bahadoran, Z., Mirmiran, P., Kashfi, K., & Ghasemi, A. (2020). The principles of biomedical scientific writing: Citation. International Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism, 18(2), Article e102622. https://doi.org/10.5812/ijem.102622
Bornmann, L., & Daniel, H.-D. (2008). What do citation counts measure? A review of studies on citing behavior. Journal of Documentation, 64(1), 45–80. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410810844150
Web of Science. (2025, August 6). Citation function class. Web of Science Enriched Cited References. https://webofscience.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/27713957430033-Enriched-Cited-References-Citation-Function-Class
Cohan, A., Ammar, W., Van Zuylen, M., & Cady, F. (2019). Structural scaffolds for citation intent classification in scientific publications. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, 3586–3596. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/N19-1361
Cronin, B. (1984). The citation process: The role and significance of citations in scientific communication. T. Graham.
Dong, C., & Schäfer, U. (2011). Ensemble-style self-training on citation classification. In H. Wang & D. Yarowsky (Eds.), Proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (pp. 623–631). Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing. https://aclanthology.org/I11-1070
Donner, P., Stahlschmidt, S., Haunschild, R., & Bornmann, L. (2025). Does citation context information enhance the validity of citation analysis for measuring research quality? An empirical comparison of peer assessments and enriched citations. Quantitative Science Studies, 6, 967–987. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss.a.15
Kostoff, R. N. (1998). The use and misuse of citation analysis in research evaluation. Scientometrics, 43(1), 27–43. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02458392
Kunnath, S. N., Herrmannova, D., Pride, D., & Knoth, P. (2021). A meta-analysis of semantic classification of citations. Quantitative Science Studies, 2(4), 1170–1215. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00159
Meyer, T., & Spencer, J. (1996). A citation analysis study of library science: Who cites librarians? College & Research Libraries, 57(1), 23–33. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.57.1.23
Moed, H. F. (2009). New developments in the use of citation analysis in research evaluation. Archivum Immunologiae et Therapiae Experimentalis, 57(1), 13–18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00005-009-0001-5
Schoonbaert, D., & Roelants, G. (1996). Citation analysis for measuring the value of scientific publications: Quality assessment tool or comedy of errors? Tropical Medicine & International Health, 1(6), 739–752. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-3156.1996.tb00106.x
Small, H. (1981). The relationship of information science to the social sciences: A co-citation analysis. Information Processing & Management, 17(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/0306-4573(81)90030-6
Uzunboylu, H., Eriş, H., & Ozcinar, Z. (2011). Results of a citation analysis of knowledge management in education. British Journal of Educational Technology, 42(3), 527–538. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.01018.x
Wang, M., Ren, J., Li, S., & Chen, G. (2019). Quantifying a paper’s academic impact by distinguishing the unequal intensities and contributions of citations. IEEE Access, 7, 96198–96214. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2927016
Worrall, J. L., & Cohn, E. G. (2023). Citation data and analysis: Limitations and shortcomings. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 39(3), 327–340. https://doi.org/10.1177/10439862231170972