Abstract
Citation networks of scientific publications offer fundamental insights into the structure and development of scientific knowledge. We propose a new measure, called intermediacy, for tracing the historical development of scientific knowledge. Given two publications, an older and a more recent one, intermediacy identifies publications that seem to play a major role in the historical development from the older to the more recent publication. The identified publications are important in connecting the older and the more recent publication in the citation network. After providing a formal definition of intermediacy, we study its mathematical properties. We then present two empirical case studies, one tracing historical developments at the interface between the community detection literature and the scientometric literature and one examining the development of the literature on peer review. We show both conceptually and empirically how intermediacy differs from main path analysis, which is the most popular approach for tracing historical developments in citation networks. Main path analysis tends to favour longer paths over shorter ones, whereas intermediacy has the opposite tendency. Compared to the main path analysis, we conclude that intermediacy offers a more principled approach for tracing the historical development of scientific knowledge.
Highlights
Citation networks provide invaluable information for tracing historical developments in science
As an alternative to main path analysis, we introduce a new approach for tracing historical developments in science based on citation networks
Given two publications dealing with a specific research topic, an older publication and a more recent one, intermediacy can be used to identify publications that appear to play a major role in the historical development from the older to the more recent publication
Summary
Citation networks provide invaluable information for tracing historical developments in science. As an alternative to main path analysis, we introduce a new approach for tracing historical developments in science based on citation networks. This approach is based on a measure that we call intermediacy. Given two publications dealing with a specific research topic, an older publication and a more recent one, intermediacy can be used to identify publications that appear to play a major role in the historical development from the older to the more recent publication These are publications that, based on citation links, are important in connecting the older and the more recent publication. Intermediacy is different because it is defined relative to a specific source and target node, not relative to a network as a whole This is why centrality measures cannot be used to capture the idea of intermediacy. Preliminary work on the intermediacy was presented in [23]
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