How authors cite references? A study of characteristics of in‐text citations.

How to differentiate citations is continuously an important research question of citation analysis. Recently, some researchers analyze full‐text academic articles with tools and techniques of natural language processing to find out the characteristics of in‐text citations. In this study, we analyze 4,255 articles published during 2007 to 2016 to explore how authors of library and information science (LIS) cite references in their articles. The pattern of citations shows that LIS authors cite more works on average but the average in‐text citation times per reference in an article only increase slightly in this period. There are more in‐text citations in the first quarter fraction of an article and the number of in‐text citations decrease gradually with text progression. The distribution of POS shows that when LIS authors mention references in text body, they use more noun, verb, and preposition than less adjective and adverb. We also choose the high frequency words of different POS to investigate which words authors prefer in in‐text citations. In these high frequency words, nouns tend to be about research topics. Verbs are neutral or used to describe methods or findings of these cited works. As to adjective and adverb, most of them are positive or neutral. But there are more negative words in adverb. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]