2,043 research outputs found
Three-feature model to reproduce the topology of citation networks and the effects from authors' visibility on their h-index
Various factors are believed to govern the selection of references in
citation networks, but a precise, quantitative determination of their
importance has remained elusive. In this paper, we show that three factors can
account for the referencing pattern of citation networks for two topics, namely
"graphenes" and "complex networks", thus allowing one to reproduce the
topological features of the networks built with papers being the nodes and the
edges established by citations. The most relevant factor was content
similarity, while the other two - in-degree (i.e. citation counts) and {age of
publication} had varying importance depending on the topic studied. This
dependence indicates that additional factors could play a role. Indeed, by
intuition one should expect the reputation (or visibility) of authors and/or
institutions to affect the referencing pattern, and this is only indirectly
considered via the in-degree that should correlate with such reputation.
Because information on reputation is not readily available, we simulated its
effect on artificial citation networks considering two communities with
distinct fitness (visibility) parameters. One community was assumed to have
twice the fitness value of the other, which amounts to a double probability for
a paper being cited. While the h-index for authors in the community with larger
fitness evolved with time with slightly higher values than for the control
network (no fitness considered), a drastic effect was noted for the community
with smaller fitness
Visibility and Citation Impact
The number of publications is the first criteria for assessing a researcher output. However, the main measurement for author productivity is the number of citations, and citations are typically related to the paper's visibility. In this paper, the relationship between article visibility and the number of citations is investigated. A case study of two researchers who are using publication marketing tools confirmed that the article visibility will greatly improve the citation impact. Some strategies to make the publications available to a larger audience have been presented at the end of this paper
On time-varying collaboration networks
The patterns of scientific collaboration have been frequently investigated in
terms of complex networks without reference to time evolution. In the present
work, we derive collaborative networks (from the arXiv repository)
parameterized along time. By defining the concept of affine group, we identify
several interesting trends in scientific collaboration, including the fact that
the average size of the affine groups grows exponentially, while the number of
authors increases as a power law. We were therefore able to identify, through
extrapolation, the possible date when a single affine group is expected to
emerge. Characteristic collaboration patterns were identified for each
researcher, and their analysis revealed that larger affine groups tend to be
less stable
Towards a more realistic citation model: The key role of research team sizes
We propose a new citation model which builds on the existing models that
explicitly or implicitly include "direct" and "indirect" (learning about a
cited paper's existence from references in another paper) citation mechanisms.
Our model departs from the usual, unrealistic assumption of uniform probability
of direct citation, in which initial differences in citation arise purely
randomly. Instead, we demonstrate that a two-mechanism model in which the
probability of direct citation is proportional to the number of authors on a
paper (team size) is able to reproduce the empirical citation distributions of
articles published in the field of astronomy remarkably well, and at different
points in time. Interpretation of our model is that the intrinsic citation
capacity, and hence the initial visibility of a paper, will be enhanced when
more people are intimately familiar with some work, favoring papers from larger
teams. While the intrinsic citation capacity cannot depend only on the team
size, our model demonstrates that it must be to some degree correlated with it,
and distributed in a similar way, i.e., having a power-law tail. Consequently,
our team-size model qualitatively explains the existence of a correlation
between the number of citations and the number of authors on a paper.Comment: Published in journal Entropy. Open access article available at
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/entrop
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