Citation network

Citation Network is a Social network which contains paper sources and linked by co-citation relationships. Egghe & Rousseau once (1990, p. 228) explain “when a document d_i cites a document d_j, we can show this by an arrow going from the node representing d_i to the document representing d_j. In this way the documents from a collection D form a directed graph, which is called a ‘citation graph’ or ‘citation network’”.^[1]

Background and History

Citation is a reference to a published or unpublished source (not always the original source). More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of acknowledging the relevance of the works of others to the topic of discussion at the spot where the citation appears. Generally the combination of both the in-body citation and the bibliographic entry constitutes what is commonly thought of as a citation (whereas bibliographic entries by themselves are not). References to single, machine-readable assertions in electronic scientific articles are known as nanopublications, a form of microattribution. Citation networks, the principal focus of this study, are one kind of social networks that have been studied quantitatively almost from the moment citation databases first became available. In 1965, Derek J. de Solla Price described the inherent linking characteristic of the SCI in his seminal paper titled "Networks of Scientific Papers". The links between citing and cited papers became dynamic when the SCI began to be published online. In 1973, Henry Small published his work on co-citation analysis which became a self-organizing classification system that led to document clustering experiments and eventually what is called "Research Reviews".^[2]

Basis and Figures^[2]

• Citation networks are directed. The links go from one document to the other.
• Citation networks are acyclic because a paper can cite only existing papers.
• All edges in the citation networks point backwards in time.
• Links in co-authorship networks are reciprocal (symmetric).
• The link weights between two authors in co-authorship networks can increase over time if they have further collaboration.
• Vertices and edges added to the citation/co-authorship networks are permanent and cannot be removed at a later time.
• The already formed part of the network is mostly static and only the leading edge of the network changes.

References

1. Science Citation Index: Effectiveness in locating articles in the anaesthetics field: ‘Perturbation of ion transport’. British Journal of Anaesthesia, 43: 814, Cawkell, A. E. (1971)
2. Structures and Statistics of Citation Networks, Miray Kas