Community Structure of the Physical Review Citation Network

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the community structure of the Physical Review citation network from 1893 to 2007, revealing major physics subfields and unexpected interdisciplinary links through modularity maximization.

Contribution

It applies modularity maximization to a large citation network to identify physics subfield communities and uncovers novel interdisciplinary connections and temporal community dynamics.

Findings

Major communities correspond to physics subfields

Unexpected links between disparate fields identified

Temporal evolution of communities analyzed

Abstract

We investigate the community structure of physics subfields in the citation network of all Physical Review publications between 1893 and August 2007. We focus on well-cited publications (those receiving more than 100 citations), and apply modularity maximization to uncover major communities that correspond to clearly-identifiable subfields of physics. While most of the links between communities connect those with obvious intellectual overlap, there sometimes exist unexpected connections between disparate fields due to the development of a widely-applicable theoretical technique or by cross fertilization between theory and experiment. We also examine communities decade by decade and also uncover a small number of significant links between communities that are widely separated in time.