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that the overarching reason for citing is “interestingness”: An author cites
a certain publication because it is of interest for the citing publication, see
also (Liu & Rousseau, 2013). Indeed, most reasons for citing—
acceptable or not—can be described using the term interestingness. In this
sense, interestingness can also be considered as perceived relevance (Poole,
1985; White, 2001). Somewhat similarly, citing may be viewed as a kind
of voting (Doyle et al., 1996), whatever the reason for the vote.

5.4 CITATION CLASSIFICATION SCHEMES

5.4.1 The Moravcsik-Murugesan Classification of Citations
Moravcsik and Murugesan (1975) proposed a classification such that a
citation always belongs to one of two alternatives. Four sets of alternatives
were considered:
• Conceptual (reference is made to an idea, a concept or a theory) or
operational (reference is made to a method, tool or technique).
• Organic (5essential) or perfunctory (not essential, ceremonial).
• Evolutionary (building on previous ideas) or juxtapositional (an alter-
native viewpoint is proposed).
• Affirmative or negational.
Moreover, Moravcsik and Murugesan observed that many citations are
redundant. This means that there are many references included that all
make more or less the same point. This may happen when one provides
relevant background information. Instead of referring to one or two stan-
dard reference books or reviews one provides a long series of books or
articles. These references are not all redundant or perfunctory, but taken
as a whole, the majority among them is perfunctory. The main result
drawn from their sample of high energy physics was that 41% of the cita-
tions fell in the perfunctory category.

5.4.2 The Chubin-Moitra Classification Scheme

The work of Chubin and Moitra (1975) was a more or less direct
response to Moravcsik and Murugesan. Although they recognized the
value of an approach to citation analysis based on an inspection of the
contents of an article, they recommend a mutually exclusive classification
scheme. This approach leads to a tree structure, see Fig. 5.1.
In this scheme affirmative citations are either essential or supplemen-
tary. Essential citations are further categorized as basic if the references