Main-path analysis and path-dependent transitions in HistCite(TM)-based historiograms

With the program HistCite(TM) it is possible to generate and visualize the most relevant papers in a set of documents retrieved from the Science Citation Index. Historical reconstructions of scientific developments can be represented chronologically as developments in networks of citation relations extracted from scientific literature. This study aims to go beyond the historical reconstruction of scientific knowledge, enriching the output of HistCite(TM) with algorithms from social network analysis and information theory.