Assessing impact and quality from local dynamics of citation networks

Camille Roth (1, 2, 3) , Jiang Wu (4, 5) , Sergi Lozano (4)

1 CAMS - Centre d'Analyse et de Mathématique sociales
2 CMB - Centre Marc Bloch
3 ISC-PIF - Institut des Systèmes Complexes - Paris Ile-de-France
4 SOMS - Chair of Sociology, in particular Modeling and Simulation
5 School of Information Management

We show that essentially local dynamics of citation networks bring special information about the relevance/quality of a paper. Up to some rescaling, they exhibit universal behavior in citation dynamics: temporal patterns are remarkably consistent across disciplines, and uncover a prediction method for citations based on the structure of references only, at publication time. Above-average cited papers universally focus extensively on their own recent subfield - as such, citation counts essentially select what may plausibly be considered as the most disciplinary and normal science; whereas papers which have a peculiar dynamics, such as re-birthing scientific works - 'rediscovered classics' or 'early birds' - are comparatively poorly cited, despite their plausible relevance for the underlying communities. The "rebirth index" that we propose to quantify this phenomenon may be used as a complementary quality-defining criterion, in addition to final citation counts.

Mots clés: Citation networks; Bibliometrics; Qualitative assessment; Citation dynamics

Domaines: Sociologie; Autre [cond-mat.other]; Modélisation et simulation; Adaptation et Systèmes auto-organisés [nlin.AO]; Sciences de l'information et de la communication

Camille Roth, Jiang Wu, Sergi Lozano. Assessing impact and quality from local dynamics of citation networks. Journal of Informetrics, 2012, 6 (1), pp.111-120. ⟨10.1016/j.joi.2011.08.005⟩. ⟨halshs-00778517⟩