Biomedical articles share annotations with their citation neighbors

BACKGROUND: Numerous efforts have been poured into annotating the wealth of knowledge contained in biomedical articles. Thanks to such efforts, it is now possible to quantitatively explore relations between these annotations and the citation network at large scale. RESULTS: With the aid of several large and small annotation databases, this study shows that articles share annotations with their citation neighborhood to the point that the neighborhood’s most common annotations are likely to be those appearing in the article. CONCLUSIONS: These findings posit that an article’s citation neighborhood defines to a large extent the article’s annotated content. Thus, citations should be considered as a foundation for future knowledge management and annotation of biomedical articles.