Highly cited references in PLOS ONE and their in-text usage over time

In this article, we describe highly cited publications in a PLOS ONE full-text corpus. For these publications, we analyse the citation contexts concerning their position in the text and their age at the time of citing. By selecting the perspective of highly cited papers, we can distinguish them based on the context during citation even if we do not have any other information source or metrics. We describe the top cited references based on how, when and in which context they are cited. The focus of this study is on a time perspective to explain the nature of the reception of highly cited papers. We have found that these references are distinguishable by the IMRaD sections of their citation. And further, we can show that the section usage of highly cited papers is time-dependent: the longer the citation interval, the higher the probability that a reference is cited in a method section.