Citation graphs are not knowledge graphs

Abstract

Citation graphs and knowledge graphs are often conflated in scholarly-infrastructure discussions but make incompatible structural commitments. Citation graphs are paper-to-paper, untyped, and append-only; knowledge graphs are entity-to-entity, typed, and revisable. We catalogue six structural differences with concrete failure modes when one is used as the other, then propose a typed-edge extension to the citation graph that recovers the most useful KG affordances without breaking BibTeX. The proposal is implemented in the rrxiv reference server.

Claims (5)

Each registered assertion in this paper is addressable as a claim node, with its own replication and contradiction record.

Treating citation edges as semantic relationships causes systematic over-attribution: 34% of citations in our sample do not express dependency in the structural sense.

Untested

A typed-edge extension (depends_on / supports / contradicts / extends) recovers 89% of the queries our knowledge-graph baseline could answer, while staying compatible with existing BibTeX tooling.

Replicated

Knowledge-graph node identity is unstable across schema versions in a way that citation-graph identity is not; downstream consumers must either pin to a snapshot or handle entity merges.

Untested

Citation networks are append-only in practice (retractions excepted); knowledge graphs revise nodes and edges continuously. Conflating the two breaks reproducibility.

Untested

The proposed typed-edge extension is implemented in the rrxiv reference server and round-trips through `cir.schema.json` without information loss.

Untested

Discussion (1)

Commentary (1)

Summary0000-0001-0000-00012026-05-18
This paper makes the structural case; claim-graph-first-class (rrxiv:2605.00002) operationalises the typed-edge proposal.

Cite this paper

BibTeXRISJSON

@article{260500006,
  title  = {Citation graphs are not knowledge graphs},
  author = {Blaise Albis-Burdige and Claude},
  rrxiv  = {rrxiv:2605.00006},
  year   = {2026}
}