Andrzej Pȩkalski Networks of Scientific Interests With Internal Degrees of Freedom Through Self-Citation Analysis

Abstract

Old and recent theoretical works by Andrzej Pȩkalski (APE) are recalled as possible sources of interest for describing network formation and clustering in complex (scientific) communities, through self-organisation and percolation processes. Emphasis is placed on APE self-citation network over four decades. The method is that used for detecting scientists' field mobility by focusing on author's self-citation, co-authorships and article topics networks as in [1,2]. It is shown that APE's self-citation patterns reveal important information on APE interest f or research topics over time as well as APE engagement on different scientific topics and in different networks of collaboration. Its interesting complexity results from "degrees of freedom" and external fields leading to so called internal shock resistance. It is found that APE network of scientific interests belongs to independent clusters and occurs through rare or drastic events as in irreversible "preferential attachment processes", similar to those found in usual mechanics and thermodynamics phase transitions.

Analyzing and modeling real-world phenomena with complex networks: a survey of applications

“…The self-citation issue was addressed by Hellsten et al [336,337] by adopting the optimal percolation method [338,339]. They proposed a methodology over the self-citation evolution patterns of a specific author and compared this pattern to the co-authors and keywords in the articles.…”

“…The method was used to detect emerging research fields and to trace mobility of scientists through different fields and critical moments in the academic career. For one author, changing co-authorship drives the changing research interests and move to new research topics [336] while for another author, this inter-field movement is an effect of maintenance of the same collaborators [337].…”

A scientometrics law about co-authors and their ranking: the co-author core

“…Yet, Glänzel and Thijs [49] have shown that multi-authorship does not result in any exaggerate extent of self − citations. In fact, self-citations can indicate some author creativity, or versatility at changing his/her field of research [50][51][52][53] To take into account the effect of multiple co − authorship through the h−index, Hirsch [54], himself, even proposed the index as being the number of papers of an individual that have a citation count larger than or equal to the h−index of all co-authors of each paper. Of course, ≤ h. With the original h-index a multiple-author paper in general belongs to the h-core of some of its coauthors and not belong to the h-core of the remaining coauthors.…”

A Two-Layer Network Model Reveals the Adhesion Scientist Career Stage and Research Topic in China

“…Therefore, through the discussion of the structure and evolution of the cooperation network, researchers can analyze the process and quality of cooperation between partners [6], [7], and also use the citation network to explore the citation trend of scholars [8], identify communities in the citation network where the published papers cited by the others [9]. A special application of the citation network is to detect the topic changes by an author's self-citation network, in which co-authorships and keywords in self-citing articles are considered [10], [11]. In this context, exploring the topic changes that scientists face in expanding their research scopes and scientific horizons have become a very challenging work.…”