Understanding the Scientific Enterprise: Citation Analysis, Data and Modeling

Abstract

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. Given their importance in practical contexts, the interest in the study of bibliographic datasets is no longer restricted to specialists in bibliometrics but extends to scholars having very different primary fields of research. As a result, the recent past has witnessed a huge production of papers on this topic of research. The present chapter aims at providing a brief overview of the progress recently made in the analysis of bibliographic databases. In the first part of the chapter, we will focus our attention on studies devoted to the statistical description of distributions of citations received by individual publications. The second part is instead devoted at summarizing some recent research efforts towards the modeling of the citation dynamics and the growth of citation networks.

Towards a More Realistic Citation Model: The Key Role of Research Team Sizes

“…The goal of this study is to investigate fundamental citation mechanisms by comparing different models (simulations) with the real data. It is therefore preferable to test the models with an empirical dataset that would minimize the influence of disciplinary differences and obsolescence, two factors identified by previous studies as having significant effect on citations and their distributions [ 22 ]. The field of astronomy represents a particularly good choice, because it is fairly active (large publication volumes) and yet the majority of research articles is published in only several journals with the same breadth of topics, shared audience, and similar citation patterns.…”

“…In this study we will focus on both aspects of this question. Citation models from the network perspective have been reviewed in references [ 21 , 22 ]. Here, we present a summary of key developments and their interpretations.…”

Modeling the coevolution between citations and coauthorship of scientific papers

“…Coauthorship and citations are typical relationships in scientific activities, which can be observed from datasets of scientific papers, and expressed as graphs called coauthorship and citation networks respec- those networks (especially, with consideration of the papers' publication time) sheds light on modes of collaborations within science, and helps to discover trends of academic research [1][2][3][4].…”

“…Those networks provide big pictures of the topological connections between authors and papers respectively. Modelling the mechanisms and temporal dynamics of arXiv:1607.04884v6 [physics.soc-ph] 28 Sep 2017 those networks (especially, with consideration of the papers' publication time) sheds light on modes of collaborations within science, and helps to discover trends of academic research [1][2][3][4].…”

The “space of physics journals”: topological structure and the Journal Impact Factor

“…The prevailing view is that scientometrics enables us to discuss more clearly and precisely issues related to the evaluation of universities, laboratories, individual scientists and scientific journals. However, as a practical knowledge Kinouchi (2014); Radicchi and Castellano (2015); Vitanov (2016); Mingers and Yang (2017); Wouters (2017) scientometrics serves only as a subsidiary element of the system of scientific governance Beer (2016). The cognitive value of the vast majority of scientometric research on scientific journals is limited to various types of indicators (we do not go into this question here, and refer the reader to, e.g., Glänzel and Moed (2013); Mingers and Leydesdorff (2015); Kosten (2016); Leydesdorff et al (2016); Rijcke et al (2016); Bornmann and Haunschild (2017)), with the most well-respected being the Journal Impact Factor Garfield (2006) (JIF for short).…”