Towards more convergent main paths: A relevance-based approach

Abstract

This research proposes a new approach that considers citation relevance in main path analysis (MPA). Traditional MPA assumes that all citations have equal weight, but in practice treating every citation equally may not find the main paths that truthfully reflect the knowledge flow in a target science field. To address the issue, this study suggests taking the level of relevance among documents into consideration. For demonstration purposes, the level of relevance is determined by similarity in both citation structure and key phrases among documents. The approach not only achieves convergence of development trajectories, but also helps frame the topics on the main paths to a specific concept from a wide range of research domains. This study takes health interoperability fields as the demonstration case to show the effects of converging the trajectories toward a target domain.