A survey on sentiment analysis of scientific citations

Sentiment analysis of scientific citations has received much attention in recent years because of the increased availability of scientific publications. Scholarly databases are valuable sources for publications and citation information where researchers can publish their ideas and results. Sentiment analysis of scientific citations aims to analyze the authors’ sentiments within scientific citations. During the last decade, some review papers have been published in the field of sentiment analysis. Despite the growth in the size of scholarly databases and researchers’ interests, no one as far as we know has carried out an in-depth survey in a specific area of sentiment analysis in scientific citations. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of sentiment analysis of scientific citations. In this review, the process of scientific citation sentiment analysis is introduced and recently proposed methods with the main challenges are presented, analyzed and discussed. Further, we present related fields such as citation function classification and citation recommendation that have recently gained enormous attention. Our contributions include identifying the most important challenges as well as the analysis and classification of recent methods used in scientific citation sentiment analysis. Moreover, it presents the normal process, and this includes citation context extraction, public data sources, and feature selection. We found that most of the papers use classical machine learning methods. However, due to limitations of performance and manual feature selection in machine learning, we believe that in the future hybrid and deep learning methods can possibly handle the problems of scientific citation sentiment analysis more efficiently and reliably.