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arXiv · 1909.08738

Co-citations in context: disciplinary heterogeneity is relevant

James Bradley·Sitaram Devarakonda·Avon Davey·Dmitriy Korobskiy·Siyu Liu·Djamil Lakhdar-Hamina·Tandy Warnow·George Chacko
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Abstract

Citation analysis of the scientific literature has been used to study and define disciplinary boundaries, to trace the dissemination of knowledge, and to estimate impact. Co-citation, the frequency with which pairs of publications are cited, provides insight into how documents relate to each other and across fields. Co-citation analysis has been used to characterize combinations of prior work as conventional or innovative and to derive features of highly cited publications. Given the organization of science into disciplines, a key question is the sensitivity of such analyses to frame of reference. Our study examines this question using semantically-themed citation networks. We observe that trends reported to be true across the scientific literature do not hold for focused citation networks, and we conclude that inferring novelty using co-citation analysis and random graph models benefits from disciplinary context.

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James Bradley, Sitaram Devarakonda, Avon Davey, Dmitriy Korobskiy, Siyu Liu, Djamil Lakhdar-Hamina, Tandy Warnow, George Chacko. 2019-09-18. Co-citations in context: disciplinary heterogeneity is relevant. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00007

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