A contextual citation analysis was performed on a sample of 68 articles citing either or both oftwo key papers from the research field of stratospheric ozone monitoring.The theoretical approach of each article was assessed as either chemical or dynamical, or wasleft unspecified. Functions of citations to the two key papers were classified into 13 categories,seen to express various kinds of relevance relationships. Topical relatedness between citedand citing articles was studied in terms of number of shared descriptors and the union overlapmeasure. A certain theory~dependence, in the sense of a relatively high degree of correspondence between the theoretical approach of citing and cited articles, was observed in the material. The correlation between topical relatedness and citation relationships appeared to beweak.