Citations with different levels of relevancy: Tracing the main paths of legal opinions

This study explores the effect from considering citation relevancy in the main path analysis. Traditional citation‐based analyses treat all citations equally even though there can be various reasons and different levels of relevancy for one document to reference another. Taking the relevancy level into consideration is intuitively advantageous because it adopts more accurate information and will thus make the results of a citation‐based analysis more trustworthy. This is nevertheless a challenging task. We are aware of no citation‐based analysis that has taken the relevancy level into consideration. The difficulty lies in the fact that the existing patent or patent citation database provides no readily available relevancy level information. We overcome this issue by obtaining citation relevancy information from a legal database that has relevancy level ranked by legal experts. This paper selects trademark dilution, a legal concept that has been the subject of many lawsuit cases, as the target for exploration. We apply main path analysis, taking citation relevancy into consideration, and verify the results against a set of test cases that are mentioned in an authoritative trademark book. The findings show that relevancy information helps main path analysis uncover legal cases of higher importance. Nevertheless, in terms of the number of significant cases retrieved, relevancy information does not seem to make a noticeable difference.

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