A guiding diagram for the selection of a CiTO citation function for a given in-text citation

A decision model for the selection of a Citation Typing Ontology (CiTO, http://purl.org/spar/cito) citation function to use for the annotation of the citation intent of an examined in-text citation based on its context. The first large row of the diagram contains three macro-categories: (1) “Reviewing …”, (2) “Affecting …”, and (3) “Referring …”. Each macro-category has at least two subcategories, and each subcategory refers to a set of citation functions. The first row defines the suitable citation functions for it with the help of a guiding sentence to be completed according to the chosen sub-category and citation function. 

To annotate the in-text citation intent using the guiding scheme (see Figure), we use a priority ranked strategy that works as follows: 

1. we match each in-text citation against at least one of the three macro-categories, i.e. “Reviewing ...”, “Affecting ...” and “Referring ...” (first row in Figure);
2. for each macro-category we have selected in (1), we choose one or more citation functions from those provided by CiTO;
3. in case we select only one citation function, then we annotate the in-text citation intent with such a value; otherwise
4. we calculate the priority of each citation function we have selected by summing its value in parenthesis (from 0.1 to 0.6) with the corresponding value in the y-axis (from 10 to 50) and in the x-axis (from 1 to 8) shown in Figure. The smaller the sum, the more priority the citation function has. For instance, the priority of the citation function “confirms” is 11.2 that is higher than the one of the citation function “describes”, which is 43.2. Finally, we select the citation function that has higher priority and annotate the in-text citation function with it.