Evaluating citation functions in CiTO: Cognitive issues

Networks of citations are a key tool for referencing, disseminating and evaluating research results. The task of characterising the functional role of citations in scientific literature is very difficult, not only for software agents but for humans, too. The main problem is that the mental models of different annotators hardly ever converge to a single shared opinion. The goal of this paper is to investigate how an existing reference model for classifying citations, namely CiTO (Citation Typing Ontology), is interpreted and used by annotators of scientific literature. We present an experiment capturing the cognitive processes behind subjects' decisions in annotating papers with CiTO, and we provide initial ideas to refine future releases of CiTO. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.