Citations perform many functions in scientific articles. In addition to their primary function, which is to recognize that a passage has been borrowed from another author, citations perform at least two other functions. On the one hand, they signal that the article in which they appear is in a dialogical relationship with past texts. On the other, they aim to increase the persuasive force of the article to which they have been added, by linking it to the works of others. Citations can, moreover, perform another function, which is, however, much less studied. They can be employed to augment the efficiency and the accuracy of the language used to express the article’s content. When used with this purpose, citations trace and analyze earlier usages of a term often with the aim to carefully delineate its meaning. These citations, which we have called semantic markers (Collet 2016, 2018), can be found, for instance, in scientific articles focusing on the humanities and the social sciences. Our aim is to present a classification of the various types of semantic information that semantic markers can convey. We will base the classification on data extracted from a corpus of scientific articles published in four disciplines in the humanities and social sciences: linguistics, psychology, sociology, and history. We will, furthermore, provide statistical data to show that the use of semantic markers is well established in the above-mentioned disciplines.