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Homophily and missing links in citation networks
Citation networks have been widely used to study the evolution of science through the lenses of the underlying patterns of knowledge flows among academic papers, authors, research sub-fields, and scientific journals. Here we focus on citation networks to cast light on the salience of homophily, name...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7175687/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32355597 http://dx.doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0068-2 |
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author | Ciotti, Valerio Bonaventura, Moreno Nicosia, Vincenzo Panzarasa, Pietro Latora, Vito |
author_facet | Ciotti, Valerio Bonaventura, Moreno Nicosia, Vincenzo Panzarasa, Pietro Latora, Vito |
author_sort | Ciotti, Valerio |
collection | PubMed |
description | Citation networks have been widely used to study the evolution of science through the lenses of the underlying patterns of knowledge flows among academic papers, authors, research sub-fields, and scientific journals. Here we focus on citation networks to cast light on the salience of homophily, namely the principle that similarity breeds connection, for knowledge transfer between papers. To this end, we assess the degree to which citations tend to occur between papers that are concerned with seemingly related topics or research problems. Drawing on a large data set of articles published in the journals of the American Physical Society between 1893 and 2009, we propose a novel method for measuring the similarity between articles through the statistical validation of the overlap between their bibliographies. Results suggest that the probability of a citation made by one article to another is indeed an increasing function of the similarity between the two articles. Our study also enables us to uncover missing citations between pairs of highly related articles, and may thus help identify barriers to effective knowledge flows. By quantifying the proportion of missing citations, we conduct a comparative assessment of distinct journals and research sub-fields in terms of their ability to facilitate or impede the dissemination of knowledge. Findings indicate that Electromagnetism and Interdisciplinary Physics are the two sub-fields in physics with the smallest percentage of missing citations. Moreover, knowledge transfer seems to be more effectively facilitated by journals of wide visibility, such as Physical Review Letters, than by lower-impact ones. Our study has important implications for authors, editors and reviewers of scientific journals, as well as public preprint repositories, as it provides a procedure for recommending relevant yet missing references and properly integrating bibliographies of papers. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7175687 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | Springer Berlin Heidelberg |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-71756872020-04-28 Homophily and missing links in citation networks Ciotti, Valerio Bonaventura, Moreno Nicosia, Vincenzo Panzarasa, Pietro Latora, Vito EPJ Data Sci Regular Article Citation networks have been widely used to study the evolution of science through the lenses of the underlying patterns of knowledge flows among academic papers, authors, research sub-fields, and scientific journals. Here we focus on citation networks to cast light on the salience of homophily, namely the principle that similarity breeds connection, for knowledge transfer between papers. To this end, we assess the degree to which citations tend to occur between papers that are concerned with seemingly related topics or research problems. Drawing on a large data set of articles published in the journals of the American Physical Society between 1893 and 2009, we propose a novel method for measuring the similarity between articles through the statistical validation of the overlap between their bibliographies. Results suggest that the probability of a citation made by one article to another is indeed an increasing function of the similarity between the two articles. Our study also enables us to uncover missing citations between pairs of highly related articles, and may thus help identify barriers to effective knowledge flows. By quantifying the proportion of missing citations, we conduct a comparative assessment of distinct journals and research sub-fields in terms of their ability to facilitate or impede the dissemination of knowledge. Findings indicate that Electromagnetism and Interdisciplinary Physics are the two sub-fields in physics with the smallest percentage of missing citations. Moreover, knowledge transfer seems to be more effectively facilitated by journals of wide visibility, such as Physical Review Letters, than by lower-impact ones. Our study has important implications for authors, editors and reviewers of scientific journals, as well as public preprint repositories, as it provides a procedure for recommending relevant yet missing references and properly integrating bibliographies of papers. Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2016-03-03 2016 /pmc/articles/PMC7175687/ /pubmed/32355597 http://dx.doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0068-2 Text en © Ciotti et al. 2016 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
spellingShingle | Regular Article Ciotti, Valerio Bonaventura, Moreno Nicosia, Vincenzo Panzarasa, Pietro Latora, Vito Homophily and missing links in citation networks |
title | Homophily and missing links in citation networks |
title_full | Homophily and missing links in citation networks |
title_fullStr | Homophily and missing links in citation networks |
title_full_unstemmed | Homophily and missing links in citation networks |
title_short | Homophily and missing links in citation networks |
title_sort | homophily and missing links in citation networks |
topic | Regular Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7175687/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32355597 http://dx.doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0068-2 |
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