1. The Distribution of References
in Scientific Papers:
an Analysis of the IMRaD Structure
ISSI 2013
Vienna, 16 July 2013
Marc Bertin, Iana Atanassova, Vincent Lariviere, Yves Gingras

2. Problem
Scientific papers usually follow a specific
rhetorical structure: the IMRaD structure
(Introduction, Method, Result and Discussion).
Questions:Questions:
What relationships exist between cited
references and the structure of the text?
How does the IMRaD structure affect the
distribution of references in scientific
papers?

3. Method
Corpus: 7 peer-reviewed academic journals:
PLoS series (ONE, Biology, Computational Biology,
Genetics, Medicine, Neglected Tropical Diseases,
Pathogens)
XML using Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS)XML using Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS)
More than 47,000 scientific articles
Identify the section structure of the articles
Identify cited references in the text
Study the distribution of references according
to the text progression and structure.

4. Sections Identification
• Section titles can vary according to the
article.
• e.g. "Method", "Methods", "Method and
Model"Model"
• Section titles were analyzed in order to
match each section with one of the
section types in the IMRaD structure.

5. Sentence Level Processing
We use sentences as basic units to model
text progression
Sentence segmentation allows us to work
with text elements that are smaller than
paragraphsparagraphs
Analysis of the punctuation of the text
following a set of typographic rules
For each sentence, we count the number of
references it contains and obtain their
distribution along the text.

6. Corpus

7. Cited References
Cited references are present as separate
elements in the XML structure
Special cases needing specific processing:
reference ranges

8. ResultsResults

9. PLoS ONE &
PLoS Computational Biology

10. PloS Genetics, PLoS
Pathogens & PLoS Biology

11. PLoS Medicine & PLoS
Neglected Tropical Diseases

12. IMRaD Structure

13. Conclusion
We have obtained the distribution of
cited references in scientific papers.
We have shown that this distribution
seems quite stable and maybe evenseems quite stable and maybe even
invariant if we take into account the
changes that occur in some journals in
the positions of the different sections in
the text of the articles.

14. Thank you!Thank you!