Šubelj Lovro, Waltman Ludo, Traag Vincent, van Eck Nees Jan
University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Leiden University, Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden, The Netherlands.
R Soc Open Sci. 2020 Jan 15;7(1):190207. doi: 10.1098/rsos.190207. eCollection 2020 Jan.
Citation networks of scientific publications offer fundamental insights into the structure and development of scientific knowledge. We propose a new measure, called intermediacy, for tracing the historical development of scientific knowledge. Given two publications, an older and a more recent one, intermediacy identifies publications that seem to play a major role in the historical development from the older to the more recent publication. The identified publications are important in connecting the older and the more recent publication in the citation network. After providing a formal definition of intermediacy, we study its mathematical properties. We then present two empirical case studies, one tracing historical developments at the interface between the community detection literature and the scientometric literature and one examining the development of the literature on peer review. We show both conceptually and empirically how intermediacy differs from main path analysis, which is the most popular approach for tracing historical developments in citation networks. Main path analysis tends to favour longer paths over shorter ones, whereas intermediacy has the opposite tendency. Compared to the main path analysis, we conclude that intermediacy offers a more principled approach for tracing the historical development of scientific knowledge.
科学出版物的引用网络为洞察科学知识的结构和发展提供了基本视角。我们提出了一种名为中介性的新度量方法，用于追溯科学知识的历史发展。给定两篇出版物，一篇较旧的和一篇较新的，中介性可识别出在从旧出版物到新出版物的历史发展过程中似乎起主要作用的出版物。所识别出的出版物在引用网络中连接旧出版物和新出版物方面很重要。在给出中介性的正式定义后，我们研究其数学性质。然后我们展示两个实证案例研究，一个追溯社区检测文献和科学计量学文献之间界面的历史发展，另一个考察同行评审文献的发展。我们从概念和实证两方面展示了中介性与主路径分析的不同，主路径分析是引用网络中追溯历史发展最流行的方法。主路径分析倾向于青睐较长路径而非较短路径，而中介性则有相反的倾向。与主路径分析相比，我们得出结论，中介性为追溯科学知识的历史发展提供了一种更有原则的方法。
