Diffusion of scientific credits and the ranking of scientists

Recently, the abundance of digital data enabled the implementation of graph based ranking algorithms that provide system level analysis for ranking publications and authors. Here we take advantage of the entire Physical Review publication archive (1893-2006) to construct authors' networks where weighted edges, as measured from opportunely normalized citation counts, define a proxy for the mechanism of scientific credit transfer. On this network we define a ranking method based on a diffusion algorithm that mimics the spreading of scientific credits on the network. We compare the results obtained with our algorithm with those obtained by local measures such as the citation count and provide a statistical analysis of the assignment of major career awards in the area of Physics. A web site where the algorithm is made available to perform customized rank analysis can be found at the address http://www.physauthorsrank.orgComment: Revised version. 11 pages, 10 figures, 1 table. The portal to compute the rankings of scientists is at http://www.physauthorsrank.or

Port's role as a determinant of cruise destination socio-economic sustainability

This article argues that the cruise terminal ports play a crucial role in the economic and socio-cultural sustainability of destinations, bridging the onshore tourism offered among cruise companies, global operators, and local business and infrastructures. They support the promotion of local brands and reduce congestion. The impact of crowds on the identity of coastal cities triggered the attention of academia and media, alerting for their negative impact, specifically from the Mediterranean cruises. In parallel, it raised the research interest on cruise tourism carrying capacity and ports planning the integration of cruise tourists’ flow. However, previous studies focused on the residents’ and passengers’ perception of a specific destination, neglecting the port management role. This study aims to clarify the underneath dynamics that allow sustainable cruise–land visit. Employing a qualitative case study approach, it compares data obtained from secondary sources and port executives’ structured deep interviews from two leading transit ports connected with the Mediterranean. Lisbon is amongst the most popular tourism destinations and international cruise terminals; Livorno is a gateway port to Tuscany, mainly Florence and Pisa. Despite their different patterns, in both ports of call, a strong concern with sustainability and a reduced congestion effect are observed from the management actions on promoting the local offer and on revitalizing the terminal infrastructures in order to provide comfort shopping and entertainment amenities to passengers.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Who is the best player ever? A complex network analysis of the history of professional tennis

We consider all matches played by professional tennis players between 1968 and 2010, and, on the basis of this data set, construct a directed and weighted network of contacts. The resulting graph shows complex features, typical of many real networked systems studied in literature. We develop a diffusion algorithm and apply it to the tennis contact network in order to rank professional players. Jimmy Connors is identified as the best player of the history of tennis according to our ranking procedure. We perform a complete analysis by determining the best players on specific playing surfaces as well as the best ones in each of the years covered by the data set. The results of our technique are compared to those of two other well established methods. In general, we observe that our ranking method performs better: it has a higher predictive power and does not require the arbitrary introduction of external criteria for the correct assessment of the quality of players. The present work provides a novel evidence of the utility of tools and methods of network theory in real applications.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 4 table

Statistical significance of communities in networks

Nodes in real-world networks are usually organized in local modules. These groups, called communities, are intuitively defined as sub-graphs with a larger density of internal connections than of external links. In this work, we introduce a new measure aimed at quantifying the statistical significance of single communities. Extreme and Order Statistics are used to predict the statistics associated with individual clusters in random graphs. These distributions allows us to define one community significance as the probability that a generic clustering algorithm finds such a group in a random graph. The method is successfully applied in the case of real-world networks for the evaluation of the significance of their communities.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables. The software to calculate the C-score can be found at http://filrad.homelinux.org/cscor

A reverse engineering approach to the suppression of citation biases reveals universal properties of citation distributions

The large amount of information contained in bibliographic databases has recently boosted the use of citations, and other indicators based on citation numbers, as tools for the quantitative assessment of scientific research. Citations counts are often interpreted as proxies for the scientific influence of papers, journals, scholars, and institutions. However, a rigorous and scientifically grounded methodology for a correct use of citation counts is still missing. In particular, cross-disciplinary comparisons in terms of raw citation counts systematically favors scientific disciplines with higher citation and publication rates. Here we perform an exhaustive study of the citation patterns of millions of papers, and derive a simple transformation of citation counts able to suppress the disproportionate citation counts among scientific domains. We find that the transformation is well described by a power-law function, and that the parameter values of the transformation are typical features of each scientific discipline. Universal properties of citation patterns descend therefore from the fact that citation distributions for papers in a specific field are all part of the same family of univariate distributions.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures. Supporting information files available at http://filrad.homelinux.or

Recent advances in smellscape research for the built environment.

The interrelationships between humans, smells and the built environment have been the focus of increasing numbers of research studies in the past ten years. This paper reviews these trends and identifies the challenges in smellscape research from three aspects: methodological approaches, artistic design interventions and museum practices, and odour policy making. In response to the gaps and challenges identified, three areas of future research have also been identified for this field: smell archives and databases, social justice within odour control and management, and research into advanced building materials. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2021 Xiao, Aletta, Radicchi, McLean, Shiner and Verbeek.

Router-level community structure of the Internet Autonomous Systems

The Internet is composed of routing devices connected between them and organized into independent administrative entities: the Autonomous Systems. The existence of different types of Autonomous Systems (like large connectivity providers, Internet Service Providers or universities) together with geographical and economical constraints, turns the Internet into a complex modular and hierarchical network. This organization is reflected in many properties of the Internet topology, like its high degree of clustering and its robustness. In this work, we study the modular structure of the Internet router-level graph in order to assess to what extent the Autonomous Systems satisfy some of the known notions of community structure. We show that the modular structure of the Internet is much richer than what can be captured by the current community detection methods, which are severely affected by resolution limits and by the heterogeneity of the Autonomous Systems. Here we overcome this issue by using a multiresolution detection algorithm combined with a small sample of nodes. We also discuss recent work on community structure in the light of our results

Universality of Performance Indicators based on Citation and Reference Counts

We find evidence for the universality of two relative bibliometric indicators of the quality of individual scientific publications taken from different data sets. One of these is a new index that considers both citation and reference counts. We demonstrate this universality for relatively well cited publications from a single institute, grouped by year of publication and by faculty or by department. We show similar behaviour in publications submitted to the arXiv e-print archive, grouped by year of submission and by sub-archive. We also find that for reasonably well cited papers this distribution is well fitted by a lognormal with a variance of around 1.3 which is consistent with the results of Radicchi, Fortunato, and Castellano (2008). Our work demonstrates that comparisons can be made between publications from different disciplines and publication dates, regardless of their citation count and without expensive access to the whole world-wide citation graph. Further, it shows that averages of the logarithm of such relative bibliometric indices deal with the issue of long tails and avoid the need for statistics based on lengthy ranking procedures.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures, 11 pages of supplementary material. Submitted to Scientometric

Inheritance patterns in citation networks reveal scientific memes

Memes are the cultural equivalent of genes that spread across human culture by means of imitation. What makes a meme and what distinguishes it from other forms of information, however, is still poorly understood. Our analysis of memes in the scientific literature reveals that they are governed by a surprisingly simple relationship between frequency of occurrence and the degree to which they propagate along the citation graph. We propose a simple formalization of this pattern and we validate it with data from close to 50 million publication records from the Web of Science, PubMed Central, and the American Physical Society. Evaluations relying on human annotators, citation network randomizations, and comparisons with several alternative approaches confirm that our formula is accurate and effective, without a dependence on linguistic or ontological knowledge and without the application of arbitrary thresholds or filters.Comment: 8 two-column pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in Physical Review

Communities as Well Separated Subgraphs With Cohesive Cores: Identification of Core-Periphery Structures in Link Communities

Communities in networks are commonly considered as highly cohesive subgraphs which are well separated from the rest of the network. However, cohesion and separation often cannot be maximized at the same time, which is why a compromise is sought by some methods. When a compromise is not suitable for the problem to be solved it might be advantageous to separate the two criteria. In this paper, we explore such an approach by defining communities as well separated subgraphs which can have one or more cohesive cores surrounded by peripheries. We apply this idea to link communities and present an algorithm for constructing hierarchical core-periphery structures in link communities and first test results.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, submitted version of a paper accepted for the 7th International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications, December 11-13, 2018, Cambridge, UK; revised version at http://141.20.126.227/~qm/papers