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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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Autores principales: Klosik, David F., Bornholdt, Stefan
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2014
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4249839/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25437855
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0113184
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author Klosik, David F.
Bornholdt, Stefan
author_facet Klosik, David F.
Bornholdt, Stefan
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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 pubmed-42498392014-12-05 The Citation Wake of Publications Detects Nobel Laureates' Papers Klosik, David F. Bornholdt, Stefan PLoS One Research Article 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. Public Library of Science 2014-12-01 /pmc/articles/PMC4249839/ /pubmed/25437855 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0113184 Text en © 2014 Klosik, Bornholdt http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Klosik, David F.
Bornholdt, Stefan
The Citation Wake of Publications Detects Nobel Laureates' Papers
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
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4249839/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25437855
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0113184
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