English

Information Diffusion in Computer Science Citation Networks

Digital Libraries 2009-05-19 v1 Computers and Society

Abstract

The paper citation network is a traditional social medium for the exchange of ideas and knowledge. In this paper we view citation networks from the perspective of information diffusion. We study the structural features of the information paths through the citation networks of publications in computer science, and analyze the impact of various citation choices on the subsequent impact of the article. We find that citing recent papers and papers within the same scholarly community garners a slightly larger number of citations on average. However, this correlation is weaker among well-cited papers implying that for high impact work citing within one's field is of lesser importance. We also study differences in information flow for specific subsets of citation networks: books versus conference and journal articles, different areas of computer science, and different time periods.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0905.2636,
  title  = {Information Diffusion in Computer Science Citation Networks},
  author = {Xiaolin Shi and Belle Tseng and Lada A. Adamic},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0905.2636},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

long version of poster published at ICWSM 2009

R2 v1 2026-06-21T13:02:52.925Z