Tracing the Evolution of Physics on the Backbone of Citation Networks

Abstract

Many innovations are inspired by past ideas in a non-trivial way. Tracing these origins and identifying scientific branches is crucial for research inspirations. In this paper, we use citation relations to identify the descendant chart, i.e. the family tree of research papers. Unlike other spanning trees which focus on cost or distance minimization, we make use of the nature of citations and identify the most important parent for each publication, leading to a tree-like backbone of the citation network. Measures are introduced to validate the backbone as the descendant chart. We show that citation backbones can well characterize the hierarchical and fractal structure of scientific development, and lead to accurate classification of fields and sub-fields.

6 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Modularity and community structure in networks
• Critical phenomena in complex networks
• Finding Scientific Gems with Google
• Diffusion of scientific credits and the ranking of scientists
• Synchronization is optimal in non-diagonalizable networks
• Modeling scientific-citation patterns and other triangle-rich acyclic networks

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Recommender Systems
• Networking - A Statistical Physics Perspective
• Evolution of interdependent co-authorship and citation networks
• Accumulative time-based ranking method to reputation evaluation in information networks
• Modeling nonuniversal citation distributions: the role of scientific journals
• Revealing role of Korean Physics Society with keyword co-occurrence network
• Modelling the Evolution of Programming Languages