Tracing the Evolution of Physics on the Backbone of Citation Networks

Autor: Gualdi, S., Yeung, C. H., Zhang, Y. -C.
Rok vydání: 2011
Předmět:
Zdroj: Phys. Rev. E 84, 046104 (2011)
Druh dokumentu: Working Paper
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.84.046104
Popis: 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.
Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures
Databáze: arXiv