  Researchers may describe different aspects of past scientific publications in
their publications and the descriptions may keep changing in the evolution of
science. The diverse and changing descriptions (i.e., citation context) on a
publication characterize the impact and contributions of the past publication.
In this article, we aim to provide an approach to understanding the changing
and complex roles of a publication characterized by its citation context. We
described a method to represent the publications' dynamic roles in science
community in different periods as a sequence of vectors by training temporal
embedding models. The temporal representations can be used to quantify how much
the roles of publications changed and interpret how they changed. Our study in
the biomedical domain shows that our metric on the changes of publications'
roles is stable over time at the population level but significantly distinguish
individuals. We also show the interpretability of our methods by a concrete
example.
