Quantifying the changing role of past publications

Katalin Orosz, Illés J. Farkas and Péter Pollner ()
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Katalin Orosz: Eötvös Loránd University
Illés J. Farkas: Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Péter Pollner: Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Scientometrics, 2016, vol. 108, issue 2, No 17, 829-853

Abstract: Abstract Our current societies increasingly rely on electronic repositories of collective knowledge. An archetype of these databases is the Web of Science (WoS) that stores scientific publications. In contrast to several other forms of knowledge—e.g., Wikipedia articles—a scientific paper does not change after its “birth”. Nonetheless, from the moment a paper is published it exists within the evolving web of other papers, thus, its actual meaning to the reader changes. To track how scientific ideas (represented by groups of scientific papers) appear and evolve, we apply a novel combination of algorithms explicitly allowing for papers to change their groups. We (1) identify the overlapping clusters of the undirected yearly co-citation networks of the WoS (1975–2008) and (2) match these yearly clusters (groups) to form group timelines. After visualizing the longest lived groups of the entire data set we assign topic labels to all groups. We find that in the entire WoS multidisciplinarity is clearly over-represented among cutting edge ideas. In addition, we provide detailed examples for papers that (1) change their topic labels and (2) move between groups.

Keywords: Article co-citation network; Group dynamics; Tag extraction; Multidisciplinarity; 82C41; 91C20; 90B15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B00 C81 D70 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11192-016-1971-9

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