How many knowledge Claims are there in a Scientific Text? A Study of three Neuroscientific Articles’ content as reflected in the Citing Publications

Citations are treated as a mark of scientific contribution indicating its value for the scientific community. The in-depth studies of citing behavior show different motivation to cite and various types of citations challenging the view that all citations should be treated as equal. One aspect of citations, however, remains underestimated. Not only researchers can interpret the cited article in different ways and attribute different significance to it, but they can focus on different pieces of knowledge embedded in the text. In this study, citations are used to identify how many different knowledge objects can be extracted from one scientific publication by the scientific community. Three academic articles in neuroscience are chosen as target articles. Samples of the publications citing target articles are analyzed to reveal the cognitive content associated with them by other researchers. The study showed that the diversity of knowledge associated with one scientific text is high: a number of different knowledge objects identified by other researchers varies from 12 to 56. Knowledge objects are distributed unevenly in the sample. A small number of knowledge objects are most popular whereas others are appearing seldom. However, the diversity of citations’ content shows that a scientific publication can be valued for different reasons and there are numerous ways how it can contribute to scientific growth.