The citation wake of publications detects Nobel laureates' papers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a citation wake measure based on shortest paths in citation networks, successfully identifying influential physics papers and Nobel laureates' work over a century.

Contribution

It presents a novel citation wake metric that captures the influence of scientific papers through network shape and size, improving impact detection.

Findings

The measure detects seminal physics papers effectively.

Nobel laureates' papers are highly ranked by the citation wake.

The approach works on a century-long citation network.

Abstract

For several decades, a leading paradigm of how to quantitatively assess scientific research has been the analysis of the aggregated citation information in a set of scientific publications. Although the representation of this information as a citation network has already been coined in the 1960s, it needed the systematic indexing of scientific literature to allow for impact metrics that actually made use of this network as a whole improving on the then prevailing metrics that were almost exclusively based on the number of direct citations. However, besides focusing on the assignment of credit, the paper citation network can also be studied in terms of the proliferation of scientific ideas. Here we introduce a simple measure based on the shortest-paths in the paper's in-component or, simply speaking, on the shape and size of the wake of a paper within the citation network. Applied to a citation network containing Physical Review publications from more than a century, our approach is able to detect seminal articles which have introduced concepts of obvious importance to the further development of physics. We observe a large fraction of papers co-authored by Nobel Prize laureates in physics among the top-ranked publications.