Citations: Indicators of significance?

What makes a scientific article significant? This paper-part of a larger study which will examine how various kinds of significance can be related to one another in a coherent theoretical framework-focusses on the processes by which new knowledge claims are being integrated into the cognitive structure when they are cited in other papers. Citations appear both as “threads” linking the citing papers to the existing literature in the field, and as elements fulfilling specific functions within the arguments made in these papers. We have found that (1) it is misleading to equate every article with a single knowledge claim, let alone with an attempt to construct “a fact”; (2) even when the same “sentence” is cited repeatedly, it can be put to quite different uses in the citing papers; and (3) the process of codification of scientific knowledge through the use of references appears to be far more complex and multi-dimensional than citation context analyses focussing on the use and the gradual disappearance of modalities would lead us to believe. Some consequences for the use use of citation analysis to reconstruct cognitive structures will be discussed.