Finding Keystone Citations for Constructing Validity Chains among Research Papers

New discoveries in science are often built upon previous knowledge. Ideally, such dependency information should be made explicit in a scientific knowledge graph. The Keystone Framework was proposed for tracking the validity dependency among papers. A keystone citation indicates that the validity of a given paper depends on a previously published paper it cites. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a strategy that repurposes rhetorical category classifiers for the novel application of extracting keystone citations that relate to research methods. Five binary rhetorical category classifiers were constructed to identify Background, Objective, Methods, Results, and Conclusions sentences in biomedical papers. The resulting classifiers were used to test the strategy against two datasets. The initial strategy assumed that only citations contained in Methods sentences were methods keystone citations, but our analysis revealed that citations contained in sentences classified as either Methods or Results had a high likelihood to be methods keystone citations. Future work will focus on fine tuning the rhetorical category classifiers, experimenting with multiclass classifiers, evaluating the revised strategy with more data, and constructing a larger gold standard citation context sentence dataset for model training.