Exploiting Citation Contexts for Physics Retrieval

The text surrounding citations within scientific papers may contain terms that usefully describe cited documents and can benefit retrieval. We present a preliminary study that investigates appending citation contexts from citing documents to cited documents in the iSearch test collection. We examine the effect on information retrieval performance of a range of citation context sizes and their variable weighting. We find that relatively short citation contexts with moderate weights can improve retrieval performance, and demonstrate the feasibility of identifying citation contexts in a large collection of physics papers, paving the way for future research that exploits citation contexts for retrieval.