Information Diffusion in Computer Science Citation Networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how information spreads through computer science citation networks, revealing how citation choices influence an article's impact and how different factors affect information flow.

Contribution

It offers a novel analysis of the structural features of information diffusion in citation networks and the impact of citation behaviors on subsequent influence.

Findings

Citing recent papers and within-community sources slightly increases citations.

Impact of citing within one's field diminishes for highly cited papers.

Differences in information flow vary across publication types, fields, and time periods.

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.