The citation wake of publications detects nobel laureates' papers.

For several decades, a leading paradigm of how to quantitatively assess scientific research has been the analysis of the aggregated citation information in a set of scientific publications. Although the representation of this information as a citation network has already been coined in the 1960s, it...

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Main Authors: David F Klosik, Stefan Bornholdt
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2014-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC4249839?pdf=render
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author David F Klosik
Stefan Bornholdt
author_facet David F Klosik
Stefan Bornholdt
author_sort David F Klosik
collection DOAJ
description For several decades, a leading paradigm of how to quantitatively assess scientific research has been the analysis of the aggregated citation information in a set of scientific publications. Although the representation of this information as a citation network has already been coined in the 1960s, it needed the systematic indexing of scientific literature to allow for impact metrics that actually made use of this network as a whole, improving on the then prevailing metrics that were almost exclusively based on the number of direct citations. However, besides focusing on the assignment of credit, the paper citation network can also be studied in terms of the proliferation of scientific ideas. Here we introduce a simple measure based on the shortest-paths in the paper's in-component or, simply speaking, on the shape and size of the wake of a paper within the citation network. Applied to a citation network containing Physical Review publications from more than a century, our approach is able to detect seminal articles which have introduced concepts of obvious importance to the further development of physics. We observe a large fraction of papers co-authored by Nobel Prize laureates in physics among the top-ranked publications.
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spelling doaj.art-b8734eff72694205a962244ce839f09b2022-12-21T17:48:14ZengPublic Library of Science (PLoS)PLoS ONE1932-62032014-01-01912e11318410.1371/journal.pone.0113184The citation wake of publications detects nobel laureates' papers.David F KlosikStefan BornholdtFor several decades, a leading paradigm of how to quantitatively assess scientific research has been the analysis of the aggregated citation information in a set of scientific publications. Although the representation of this information as a citation network has already been coined in the 1960s, it needed the systematic indexing of scientific literature to allow for impact metrics that actually made use of this network as a whole, improving on the then prevailing metrics that were almost exclusively based on the number of direct citations. However, besides focusing on the assignment of credit, the paper citation network can also be studied in terms of the proliferation of scientific ideas. Here we introduce a simple measure based on the shortest-paths in the paper's in-component or, simply speaking, on the shape and size of the wake of a paper within the citation network. Applied to a citation network containing Physical Review publications from more than a century, our approach is able to detect seminal articles which have introduced concepts of obvious importance to the further development of physics. We observe a large fraction of papers co-authored by Nobel Prize laureates in physics among the top-ranked publications.http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC4249839?pdf=render
spellingShingle David F Klosik
Stefan Bornholdt
The citation wake of publications detects nobel laureates' papers.
PLoS ONE
title The citation wake of publications detects nobel laureates' papers.
title_full The citation wake of publications detects nobel laureates' papers.
title_fullStr The citation wake of publications detects nobel laureates' papers.
title_full_unstemmed The citation wake of publications detects nobel laureates' papers.
title_short The citation wake of publications detects nobel laureates' papers.
title_sort citation wake of publications detects nobel laureates papers
url http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC4249839?pdf=render
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