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Register a new userDetecting anomalous citation groups in journal networks
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The ever-increasing competitiveness in the academic publishing market incentivizes journal editors to pursue higher impact factors. This translates into journals becoming more selective, and, ultimately, into higher publication standards. However, the fixation on higher impact factors leads some journals to artificially boost impact factors through the coordinated effort of a citation cartel of journals. Citation cartel behavior has become increasingly common in recent years, with several instances being reported. Here, we propose an algorithm -- named CIDRE -- to detect anomalous groups of journals that exchange citations at excessively high rates when compared against a null model that accounts for scientific communities and journal size. CIDRE detects more than half of the journals suspended from Journal Citation Reports due to anomalous citation behavior in the year of suspension or in advance. Furthermore, CIDRE detects many new anomalous groups, where the impact factors of the member journals are lifted substantially higher by the citations from other member journals. We describe a number of such examples in detail and discuss the implications of our findings with regard to the current academic climate.
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We analyse the large-scale structure of the journal citation network built from information contained in the Thomson-Reuters Journal Citation Reports. To this end, we take advantage of the network science paraphernalia and explore network properties like density, percolation robustness, average and largest node distances, reciprocity, incoming and outgoing degree distributions, as well as assortative mixing by node degrees. We discover that the journal citation network is a dense, robust, small, and reciprocal world. Furthermore, in and out node degree distributions display long-tails, with few vital journals and many trivial ones, and they are strongly positively correlated.
Many of the essential features of the evolution of scientific research are imprinted in the structure of citation networks. Connections in these networks imply information about the transfer of knowledge among papers, or in other words, edges describe the impact of papers on other publications. This inherent meaning of the edges infers that citation networks can exhibit hierarchical features, that is typical of networks based on decision-making. In this paper, we investigate the hierarchical structure of citation networks consisting of papers in the same field. We find that the majority of the networks follow a universal trend towards a highly hierarchical state, and i) the various fields display differences only concerning their phase in life (distance from the birth of a field) or ii) the characteristic time according to which they are approaching the stationary state. We also show by a simple argument that the alterations in the behavior are related to and can be understood by the degree of specialization corresponding to the fields. Our results suggest that during the accumulation of knowledge in a given field, some papers are gradually becoming relatively more influential than most of the other papers.
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).
The study of citation networks is of interest to the scientific community. However, the underlying mechanism driving individual citation behavior remains imperfectly understood, despite the recent proliferation of quantitative research methods. Traditional network models normally use graph theory to consider articles as nodes and citations as pairwise relationships between them. In this paper, we propose an alternative evolutionary model based on hypergraph theory in which one hyperedge can have an arbitrary number of nodes, combined with an aging effect to reflect the temporal dynamics of scientific citation behavior. Both theoretical approximate solution and simulation analysis of the model are developed and validated using two benchmark datasets from different disciplines, i.e. publications of the American Physical Society (APS) and the Digital Bibliography & Library Project (DBLP). Further analysis indicates that the attraction of early publications will decay exponentially. Moreover, the experimental results show that the aging effect indeed has a significant influence on the description of collective citation patterns. Shedding light on the complex dynamics driving these mechanisms facilitates the understanding of the laws governing scientific evolution and the quantitative evaluation of scientific outputs.
In citation networks, the activity of papers usually decreases with age and dormant papers may be discovered and become fashionable again. To model this phenomenon, a competition mechanism is suggested which incorporates two factors: vigorousness and dormancy. Based on this idea, a citation network model is proposed, in which a node has two discrete stage: vigorous and dormant. Vigorous nodes can be deactivated and dormant nodes may be activated and become vigorous. The evolution of the network couples addition of new nodes and state transitions of old ones. Both analytical calculation and numerical simulation show that the degree distribution of nodes in generated networks displays a good right-skewed behavior. Particularly, scale-free networks are obtained as the deactivated vertex is target selected and exponential networks are realized for the random-selected case. Moreover, the measurement of four real-world citation networks achieves a good agreement with the stochastic model.
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