The semantic shifts in natural language is a well established phenomenon and have been
studied for many years. Similarly, the meanings of scientific publications may also change as
time goes by. In other words, the same publication may be cited in distinct contexts. To
investigate whether the meanings of citations have changed in different scenarios, which is also
called in the semantic shifts in citations, we followed the same ideas of how researchers studied
semantic shifts in language. To be more specific, we combined the temporal referencing model
and the Word2Vec model to explore the semantic shifts of scientific citations in two aspects:
their usages over time and their usages across different domains. By observing how citations
themselves changed over time and comparing the closest neighbors of citations, we concluded
that the semantics of scientific publications did shift in terms of cosine distances.
