Citing for High Impact

TL;DR

This paper introduces citation projection graphs to analyze citation patterns and their relation to scientific impact, revealing that interdisciplinary and bridging citation patterns are linked to high-impact papers and are increasingly prevalent.

Contribution

It develops the concept of citation projection graphs and systematically studies how citation patterns correlate with scientific impact across disciplines.

Findings

Low impact papers have idiosyncratic citation patterns.

Medium impact papers tend to have discipline-focused citation patterns.

High impact papers often exhibit crossing-community, bridging citation patterns.

Abstract

The question of citation behavior has always intrigued scientists from various disciplines. While general citation patterns have been widely studied in the literature we develop the notion of citation projection graphs by investigating the citations among the publications that a given paper cites. We investigate how patterns of citations vary between various scientific disciplines and how such patterns reflect the scientific impact of the paper. We find that idiosyncratic citation patterns are characteristic for low impact papers; while narrow, discipline-focused citation patterns are common for medium impact papers. Our results show that crossing-community, or bridging citation patters are high risk and high reward since such patterns are characteristic for both low and high impact papers. Last, we observe that recently citation networks are trending toward more bridging and interdisciplinary forms.