English

Quantifying the higher-order influence of scientific publications

Digital Libraries 2020-06-08 v1 Social and Information Networks

Abstract

Citation impact is commonly assessed using direct, first-order citation relations. We consider here instead the indirect influence of publications on new publications via citations. We present a novel method to quantify the higher-order citation influence of publications, considering both direct, or first-order, and indirect, or higher-order citations. In particular, we are interested in higher-order citation influence at the level of disciplines. We apply this method to the whole Web of Science data at the level of disciplines. We find that a significant amount of influence -- 42% -- stems from higher-order citations. Furthermore, we show that higher-order citation influence is helpful to quantify and visualize citation flows among disciplines, and to assess their degree of interdisciplinarity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2006.03561,
  title  = {Quantifying the higher-order influence of scientific publications},
  author = {Massimo Franceschet and Giovanni Colavizza},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.03561},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:05:44.710Z