Borner Maru Goldstone The simultaneous evolution of author and paper networks 2004

Citation

Borner, K. Maru J. Goldstone R. The simultaneous evolution of author and paper networks. PNAS. April 6, 2004.

Online version

[1]

Summary

This paper investigates the overtime evolution of citation and author networks and discusses the two processes that mainly govern the growth/evolution of such networks: aging and growth. The authors propose a model that can fit the systematic deviations from power distribution of citation networks well while accounting for the inter-related nature of the paper citation and co-authorship networks and importance of topic distributions. The model aims for integrating the following properties of citation networks:

• Authors have a bias to cite recent papers. Even highly cited papers stop receiving citation after a certain amount of time passed. This feature works against the richer get richer phenomenon enforced by aging, and frequently prevents a scale-free distribution of connectivity.
• Authors have a tendency to cite papers from the reference list of papers they have read, which is a recursive follow up of links in the network.

Brief description of the method

The model proposed in this paper is called TARL which encompasses Topics, Aging, and Recursive Linking. The model attempts to capture different roles of the authors in (i) producing, (ii) storing, and (iii) disseminating information directly by (co)authorship or indirectly by reading/citing others’ papers.

Datasets

This paper uses PNAS Dataset. The PNAS data set contains 45,120 regular articles, covering a 20-year (1982–2001) period. The number of unique authors for those papers is 105,915. Only intra-PNAS citation links are modeled in the paper, and the paper most highly cited by papers within the set received 285 citations.