Factorial Correspondence Analysis Applied to Citation Contexts

In this paper, we analyze citation contexts and characterize the different sections of scientific articles in terms of the verbs that appear in citation contexts. We have performed Factorial Correspondence Analysis (CA) using the four sections of the IMRaD (Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion) structure as categories. Our dataset contains about 80,000 research articles published in the six PLOS journals. The results of this approach show that the sections in the rhetorical structure of research articles have very different characteristics when we take into consideration the occurrences of verbs, and more generally, their lexical content. Our results demonstrate a strong relation between verbs used around citations and the positions in the rhetorical structure.