Co-citations in context: disciplinary heterogeneity is relevant

Abstract

Citation analysis of the scientific literature has been used to study and define disciplinary boundaries, to trace the dissemination of knowledge, and to estimate impact. Co-citation, the frequency with which pairs of publications are cited, provides insight into how documents relate to each other and across fields. Co-citation analysis has been used to characterize combinations of prior work as conventional or innovative and to derive features of highly cited publications. Given the organization of science into disciplines, a key question is the sensitivity of such analyses to frame of reference. Our study examines this question using semantically-themed citation networks. We observe that trends reported to be true across the scientific literature do not hold for focused citation networks, and we conclude that inferring novelty using co-citation analysis and random graph models benefits from disciplinary context.

References in corpus (4)

• From Louvain to Leiden: guaranteeing well-connected communities
• The structure of scientific collaboration networks
• Which type of citation analysis generates the most accurate taxonomy of scientific and technical knowledge?
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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Do disruption index indicators measure what they propose to measure? The comparison of several indicator variants with assessments by peers
• Finding Scientific Communities In Citation Graphs: Convergent Clustering
• AOC; Assembling Overlapping Communities
• Frequently Co-cited Publications: Features and Kinetics