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Register a new userModeling nonuniversal citation distributions: the role of scientific journals
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Whether a scientific paper is cited is related not only to the influence of its author(s) but also to the journal publishing it. Scientists, either proficient or tender, usually submit their most important work to prestigious journals which receives higher citations than the ordinary. How to model the role of scientific journals in citation dynamics is of great importance. In this paper we address this issue through two folds. One is the intrinsic heterogeneity of a paper determined by the impact factor of the journal publishing it. The other is the mechanism of a paper being cited which depends on its citations and prestige. We develop a model for citation networks via an intrinsic nodal weight function and an intuitive ageing mechanism. The nodes weight is drawn from the distribution of impact factors of journals and the ageing transition is a function of the citation and the prestige. The node-degree distribution of resulting networks shows nonuniversal scaling: the distribution decays exponentially for small degree and has a power-law tail for large degree, hence the dual behaviour. The higher the impact factor of the journal, the larger the tipping point and the smaller the power exponent that are obtained. With the increase of the journal rank, this phenomenon will fade and evolve to pure power laws.
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We study the distributions of citations received by a single publication within several disciplines, spanning broad areas of science. We show that the probability that an article is cited $c$ times has large variations between different disciplines, but all distributions are rescaled on a universal curve when the relative indicator $c_f=c/c_0$ is considered, where $c_0$ is the average number of citations per article for the discipline. In addition we show that the same universal behavior occurs when citation distributions of articles published in the same field, but in different years, are compared. These findings provide a strong validation of $c_f$ as an unbiased indicator for citation performance across disciplines and years. Based on this indicator, we introduce a generalization of the h-index suitable for comparing scientists working in different fields.
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Structural inequalities persist in society, conferring systematic advantages to some people at the expense of others, for example, by giving them substantially more influence and opportunities. Using bibliometric data about authors of scientific publications, we identify two types of structural inequalities in scientific citations. First, female authors, who represent a minority of researchers, receive less recognition for their work (through citations) relative to male authors; second, authors affiliated with top-ranked institutions, who are also a minority, receive substantially more recognition compared to other authors. We present a model for the growth of directed citation networks and show that citations disparities arise from individual preferences to cite authors from the same group (homophily), highly cited or active authors (preferential attachment), as well as the size of the group and how frequently new authors join. We analyze the model and show that its predictions align well with real-world observations. Our theoretical and empirical analysis also suggests potential strategies to mitigate structural inequalities in science. In particular, we find that merely increasing the minority group size does little to narrow the disparities. Instead, reducing the homophily of each group, frequently adding new authors to a research field while providing them an accessible platform among existing, established authors, together with balanced group sizes can have the largest impact on reducing inequality. Our work highlights additional complexities of mitigating structural disparities stemming from asymmetric relations (e.g., directed citations) compared to symmetric relations (e.g., collaborations).
We discuss microscopic mechanisms of complex network growth, with the special emphasis of how these mechanisms can be evaluated from the measurements on real networks. As an example we consider the network of citations to scientific papers. Contrary to common belief that its growth is determined by the linear preferential attachment, our microscopic measurements show that it is driven by the nonlinear autocatalytic growth. This invalidates the scale-free hypothesis for the citation network. The nonlinearity is responsible for a dramatic dynamical phase transition: while the citation lifetime of majority of papers is 6-10 years, the highly-cited papers have practically infinite lifetime.
Scientific journals are the repositories of the gradually accumulating knowledge of mankind about the world surrounding us. Just as our knowledge is organised into classes ranging from major disciplines, subjects and fields to increasingly specific topics, journals can also be categorised into groups using various metrics. In addition to the set of topics characteristic for a journal, they can also be ranked regarding their relevance from the point of overall influence. One widespread measure is impact factor, but in the present paper we intend to reconstruct a much more detailed description by studying the hierarchical relations between the journals based on citation data. We use a measure related to the notion of m-reaching centrality and find a network which shows the level of influence of a journal from the point of the direction and efficiency with which information spreads through the network. We can also obtain an alternative network using a suitably modified nested hierarchy extraction method applied to the same data. The results are weakly methodology-dependent and reveal non-trivial relations among journals. The two alternative hierarchies show large similarity with some striking differences, providing together a complex picture of the intricate relations between scientific journals.
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