Co-citations in context: disciplinary heterogeneity is relevant

TL;DR

This paper investigates how disciplinary context influences co-citation analysis, revealing that trends in citation networks vary across different scientific fields and emphasizing the importance of context in assessing novelty.

Contribution

It demonstrates that co-citation analysis results are sensitive to disciplinary boundaries and highlights the need to consider context for accurate interpretation.

Findings

Trends in co-citation analysis differ across focused citation networks.

Disciplinary context affects the inference of novelty from co-citation data.

Random graph models' effectiveness depends on disciplinary framing.

Abstract

Citation analysis of the scientific literature has been used to study and define disciplinary boundaries, to trace the dissemination of knowledge, and to estimate impact. Co-citation, the frequency with which pairs of publications are cited, provides insight into how documents relate to each other and across fields. Co-citation analysis has been used to characterize combinations of prior work as conventional or innovative and to derive features of highly cited publications. Given the organization of science into disciplines, a key question is the sensitivity of such analyses to frame of reference. Our study examines this question using semantically-themed citation networks. We observe that trends reported to be true across the scientific literature do not hold for focused citation networks, and we conclude that inferring novelty using co-citation analysis and random graph models benefits from disciplinary context.