Although literature review sections of original research papers do not have to meet the strict requirements of systematic reviews and meta-analyses, editors, peer reviewers, and readers assume authors are thorough and diligent in conducting their literature reviews. The theories behind motivations for citing practices vary, but overall, there is an expectation that authors will provide high quality citations to accurately represent the literature on their research focus or topic. They can also provide background information, identify methodology, identify original research and/or seminal articles, criticize a previous work or correct it, and substantiate claims, among others. Backgroundĭuring the writing stage of a scholarly manuscript, the citations in the literature review serve a crucial purpose in supporting or disputing the authors’ own results or conclusions. Infographic on the traditional research and writing process versus an accelerated process using automated citation recommendation tools infographic created by Rachel Miles, CC-BY. The tools included in the bulleted lists of the infographic are merely examples and not exhaustive. The infographic below demonstrates how automated citation recommendation tools can be implemented in an accelerated research process, omitting several phases of a more valid/rigorous/systematic/reliable process. According to a recent article published in Research Evaluation, automated citation recommendation tools replace a crucial stage of the research process: the literature searching and critical appraisal of the literature, and they facilitate a rather thoughtless way of citing, requiring little scrutiny from the authors. In contrast, automated citation recommendation tools find relevant literature based on the input of a piece of text, such as a statement or paragraph, and then retrieve relevant citations to back the claims made by the author. Image: Reflection Building DistortionĬollectively, literature mapping tools, databases, and search engines help researchers at the literature search phase and act as paper recommendation tools they use the input of search terms or seed paper(s) to find relevant results search engines and databases rely on the user inputting search terms, whereas literature mapping tools rely on the user inputting a seed paper to generate relevant papers using a similarity algorithm based on bibliographic coupling and co-citations. While promising to accelerate the writing process, citation recommendation tools come with major drawbacks, prompting questioning of what exactly are their benefits and perhaps unintended implications of using. More recently, citation recommendation tools have been developed, such as Citeomatic and its successor Specter. In order to use these literature mapping tools, one must first have a seed paper to plug into the tool which then finds other relevant papers based on algorithms of co-citations and bibliographic coupling. This was followed by the emergence of literature mapping tools to help with literature searching, such as LitMaps, Citation Gecko, Inciteful, and Connected Papers (see this blog post for an in-depth review of such tools). As a result, citation management tools have been developed, such as Mendeley, Zotero, and EndNote. One daunting task all researchers face is finding, managing and tracking citations for their manuscripts. However, faster does not always mean smarter. In an increasingly competitive academic environment, researchers are understandably keen to find smarter, faster ways to complete their projects. Rachel Miles summarizes a recently published journal article that cautions researchers on the use of automated citation recommendation tools, which are designed to help academic authors cite literature in the writing phase of their research project while potentially skipping crucial steps of searching, reviewing, and appraising literature.
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