A Design Methodology for a Biomedical Literature Indexing Tool Using the Rhetoric of Science

Abstract

Literature indexing tools provide re-searchers with a means to navigate through the network of scholarly scientific articles in a subject domain. We propose that more effective indexing tools may be designed using the links between articles provided by citations. With the explosion in the amount of sci-entific literature and with the advent of ar-tifacts requiring more sophisticated index-ing, a means to provide more information about the citation relation in order to give more intelligent control to the navigation process is warranted. In order to navigate a citation index in this more sophisticated manner, the citation index must provide not only the citation-link information, but also must indicate the function of the cita-tion. The design methodology of an in-dexing tool for scholarly biomedical lit-erature which uses the rhetorical context surrounding the citation to provide the ci-tation function is presented. In particular, we discuss how the scientific method is re-flected in scientific writing and how this knowledge can be used to decide the pur-pose of a citation. 1