The paper citation network is a traditional social medium for the exchange of ideas and knowledge. In this paper we view citation networks from the perspective of information diffusion. We study the structural features of the information paths through the citation networks of publications in computer science, and analyze the impact of various citation choices on the subsequent impact of the article. We find that citing recent papers and papers within the same scholarly community garners a slightly larger number of citations on average. However, this correlation is weaker among well-cited papers implying that for high impact work citing within ones field is of lesser importance. We also study differences in information flow for specific subsets of citation networks: books versus conference and journal articles, different areas of computer science, and different time periods.
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