Bibliographic relationships

Barbara B. Tillet (2001) identifies the following categories of relationships between documents:

Equivalence relation,
Derivative relation,
Descriptive relation,
Part-whole relation,
Companionship relation,
Sequential relations and
Common characteristics.

The following figure (from Tillett, 2001) shows a valuable (functional) way of determining the concept of “a work” in the library tradition:

These are not exhaustive. Relationships between citing documents and cited documents may, for example, be pointed out. According to Garfield (1965/1973, p.85), there exists the following kinds of citation motivations and thus relations between citing documents and cited documents:

Paying homage to pioneers
Giving credit for related work (homage to peers)
Identifying methodology, equipment, and so on
Providing background reading
Correcting one's own work
Correcting the work of others
Critizing previous work
Substantiating claims
Alerting to forthcoming work
Providing leads to poorly disseminated, poorly indexed, or uncited work
Authenticating data and classes of facts—physical constants, and so on
Identifying original publications in which an idea or concept was discussed
Identifying original publications or other work describing an eponymic concept or term
Disclaiming work or ideas of others (negative claims)
Disputing priority claims of others (negative homage)

Literature:

Garfield, E. (1965). Can Citation Indexing be Automated? In: Stevens, Mary E.; Giuliano, Vincent E; Heilprin, Laurence B., eds. Statistical Association Methods for Mechanized Documentation, Symposium Proceedings. 1964. Washington, WA. Washington, DC: National Bureau of Standards; 1965; 189-192. (National Bureau of Standards Miscellaneous. Publication, 269). Also published in: Essay of an Information Scientist: 1962-1973. Volume 1. Philadelphia, PA: ISI Press; 1973. 84-90. (Current Contents 9, march 4 1970). Also available on the World Wide Web: http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/V1p084y1962-73.pdf [October 27th 2000].

Tillet, B. (2001). Bibliographic relationships. IN: C. A. Bean & R. Green (Eds.): Relationships in the organization of knowledge (p. 19-35). Dordrecht: Klüwer Academic Publishers.