Modeling interdisciplinary interactions among Physics, Mathematics & Computer Science

TL;DR

This paper models the citation flow among Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science using a large dataset, revealing patterns and proposing models to understand interdisciplinary citation dynamics over time.

Contribution

It introduces a numerical modeling approach based on relay-linking frameworks to explain how citation links form across these disciplines.

Findings

Identifies specific citation patterns among the three fields

Develops models that explain the temporal evolution of citations

Provides insights into interdisciplinary research dynamics

Abstract

Interdisciplinarity has over the recent years have gained tremendous importance and has become one of the key ways of doing cutting edge research. In this paper we attempt to model the citation flow across three different fields -- Physics (PHY), Mathematics (MA) and Computer Science (CS). For instance, is there a specific pattern in which these fields cite one another? We carry out experiments on a dataset comprising more than 1.2 million articles taken from these three fields. We quantify the citation interactions among these three fields through temporal bucket signatures. We present numerical models based on variants of the recently proposed relay-linking framework to explain the citation dynamics across the three disciplines. These models make a modest attempt to unfold the underlying principles of how citation links could have been formed across the three fields over time.