The invariant distribution of references in scientific articles

Marc Bertin, Iana Atanassova, Yves Gingras, Vincent Larivière
2015 Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology  
The organization of scientific papers typically follows a standardized pattern, the well--known IMRaD structure (Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion). Using the full--text of 45,000 papers published in the PLOS series of journals as a case study, this paper investigates, from the viewpoint of bibliometrics, how references are distributed along the structure of scientific papers, as well as the age of these cited references. It shows that, once the sections of articles are realigned to
more » ... follow the IMRaD sequence, the position of cited references along the text of articles is invariant across al PLOS journals, with the introduction and conclusion accounting for most of the references. It also provides evidence that the age of cited references varies quite a lot by section, with older references being found in the methods and more recent ones in the discussion. On the whole, these results provide insights into the different roles citations have in the scholarly communication process. This table shows that almost 99% of all research articles in the corpus contain the four section types of the IMRaD structure. All seven journals in our study systematically use the IMRaD structure. The lowest value is for PLOS Computational Biology, 95.15%. If we consider all document types in the corpus (see Table 1 ), the percentage of research articles that contain all four IMRaD types is 91.1%. This result can be compared with a previous result presented by (Bertin et al. 2013) for the same corpus, where it was shown that about 83% of the articles contain the four sections that are typically found in the IMRaD structure. Here, this percentage is slightly higher due to the fact that we consider also the cases where two section types are combined into a single section as
doi:10.1002/asi.23367 fatcat:ezbcut77lrc25hxx2vqgu7ia24