Artificial intelligence: AI zooms in on highly influential citations : Nature : Nature Research

The number of times a paper is cited is a poor proxy for its impact (see P. Stephan et al. I suggest relying instead on a new metric that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to capture the subset of an author's or a paper's essential and therefore most highly influential citations. Academics may cite papers for non-essential reasons -- out of courtesy, for completeness or to promote their own publications. These superfluous citations can impede literature searches and exaggerate a paper's importance. The scientific search engine, Semantic Scholar, is the first to automatically identify the subset of a paper's citations in which the paper had a strong impact on the citing work (see http://semanticscholar.org).