Discontinuities in Citation Relations among Journals: Self-organized Criticality as a Model of Scientific Revolutions and Change

TL;DR

This paper models scientific revolutions as self-organized criticality in citation networks, showing that citation discontinuities follow power-laws and can indicate innovation and change within scientific fields.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of self-organized criticality to citation networks, revealing how citation discontinuities signal scientific change and evolve over time.

Findings

Power-law distributions of citation change instances.

Discontinuities often localized within specialties.

Citation avalanches can reconfigure knowledge structures.

Abstract

Using three-year moving averages of the complete Journal Citation Reports 1994-2016 of the Science Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index (combined), we analyze links between citing and cited journals in terms of (1) whether discontinuities among the networks of consecutive years have occurred; (2) are these discontinuities relatively isolated or networked? (3) Can these discontinuities be used as indicators of novelty, change, and innovation in the sciences? We examine each of the N2 links among the N journals across the years. We find power-laws for the top 10,000 instances of change, which we suggest interpreting in terms of "self-organized criticality": co-evolutions of avalanches in aggregated citation relations and meta-stable states in the knowledge base can be expected to drive the sciences towards the edges of chaos. The flux of journal-journal citations in new manuscripts may generate an avalanche in the meta-stable networks, but one can expect the effects to remain local (for example, within a specialty). The avalanches can be of any size; they reorient the relevant citation environments by inducing a rewrite of history in the affected partitions.