On the Stability of Citation Networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how missing keywords affect the topology and community structure of citation networks, revealing that their modular nature preserves community integrity despite keyword perturbations.

Contribution

It introduces a perturbation approach to quantify keyword influence on citation network topology and models the impact of missing keywords on community structure.

Findings

Community structure remains stable despite missing keywords.

The proposed model captures the effects of keyword omission on network topology.

Citation networks' modularity contributes to their robustness.

Abstract

Citation networks can reveal many important information regarding the development of science and the relationship between different areas of knowledge. Thus, many studies have analyzed the topological properties of such networks. Frequently, citation networks are created using articles acquired from a set of relevant keywords or queries. Here, we study the robustness of citation networks with regards to the keywords that were used for collecting the respective articles. A perturbation approach is proposed, in which the influence of missing keywords on the topology and community structure of citation networks is quantified. In addition, the relationship between keywords and the community structure of citation networks is studied using networks generated from a simple model. We find that, owing to its highly modular structure, the community structure of citation networks tends to be preserved even when many relevant keywords are left out. Furthermore, the proposed model can reflect the impact of missing keywords on different situations.