Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, United States of America.
School of Psychology , University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, AUS.
PLoS One. 2022 Apr 21;17(4):e0266513. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266513. eCollection 2022.
Researchers cannot keep up with the volume of articles being published each year. In order to develop adequate expertise in a given field of study, students and early career scientists must be strategic in what they decide to read. Here we propose using citation network analysis to characterize the literature topology of a given area. We used the human aggression literature as our example. Our citation network analysis identified 15 research communities on aggression. The five largest communities were: "media and video games", "stress, traits and aggression", "rumination and displaced aggression", "role of testosterone", and "social aggression". We examined the growth of these research communities over time, and we used graph theoretic approaches to identify the most influential papers within each community and the "bridging" articles that linked distinct communities to one another. Finally, we also examined whether our citation network analysis would help mitigate gender bias relative to focusing on total citation counts. The percentage of articles with women first authors doubled when identifying influential articles by community structure versus citation count. Our approach of characterizing literature topologies using citation network analysis may provide a valuable resource for psychological scientists by outlining research communities and their growth over time, identifying influential papers within each community (including bridging papers), and providing opportunities to increase gender equity in the field.
研究人员无法跟上每年发表的文章数量。为了在特定的研究领域发展足够的专业知识，学生和早期职业科学家必须在他们决定阅读的内容上具有策略性。在这里，我们建议使用引文网络分析来描述给定领域的文献拓扑结构。我们以人类攻击文献为例。我们的引文网络分析确定了攻击领域的 15 个研究社区。最大的五个社区是：“媒体和视频游戏”、“压力、特征和攻击”、“沉思和转移攻击”、“睾丸激素的作用”和“社会攻击”。我们考察了这些研究社区随时间的发展情况，并使用图论方法确定了每个社区中最有影响力的论文以及将不同社区相互联系起来的“桥梁”文章。最后，我们还考察了我们的引文网络分析是否有助于减轻相对于关注总引文数的性别偏见。当根据社区结构而不是引文数确定有影响力的文章时，女性第一作者的文章比例增加了一倍。我们使用引文网络分析来描述文献拓扑结构的方法，通过概述研究社区及其随时间的发展，确定每个社区内的有影响力的论文（包括桥梁论文），为增加该领域的性别平等提供了有价值的资源。
