isCitedBy

isCitedBy is a binary relation used in bibliographic data and the Semantic Web to indicate that one publication cites another. It is commonly described as the inverse of the more general cites relationship: if A cites B, then B isCitedBy A. In RDF or OWL schemas, isCitedBy may be declared as the inverseOf cites or defined as a separate property with equivalent semantics.

The relation is widely employed in knowledge graphs, citation networks, and bibliographic databases to represent links between scholarly works, books, datasets, patents, and other formal publications. It supports operations such as tracing citation chains, identifying influential works, and mapping the diffusion of ideas over time. Data users can query for entities that cite a given work by following isCitedBy, or by traversing the inverse of the cites property if the ontology defines it that way.

Data quality for isCitedBy depends on source coverage and provenance. Not all repositories report complete citation data, and definitions of what constitutes a citation can vary between publishers, disciplines, and data providers. Some datasets may implement isCitedBy as an explicit, separate property; others may rely on inverse relationships defined within a single property like cites.

Related concepts include cites, references, and bibliographic ontologies such as BIBO, which often provide mechanisms for representing inverse citation relations. In practical use, researchers employ isCitedBy to analyze citation networks, measure impact, and support tools for literature discovery and bibliometric studies.