Tracing the evolution of physics on the backbone of citation networks
- Gualdi, Stanislao Department of Physics, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
- Yeung, Chi Ho Department of Physics, University of Fribourg, Switzerland - The Nonlinearity and Complexity Research Group, Aston University, Birmingham, UK
- Zhang, Yi-Cheng Department of Physics, University of Fribourg, Switzerland - Web Sciences Center, School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
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14.10.2011
Published in:
- Physicval Review E - Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics. - 2011, vol. 84, no. 4, p. 046104
English
Many innovations are inspired by past ideas in a nontrivial way. Tracing these origins and identifying scientific branches is crucial for research inspirations. In this paper, we use citation relations to identify the descendant chart, i.e., the family tree of research papers. Unlike other spanning trees that focus on cost or distance minimization, we make use of the nature of citations and identify the most important parent for each publication, leading to a treelike backbone of the citation network. Measures are introduced to validate the backbone as the descendant chart. We show that citation backbones can well characterize the hierarchical and fractal structure of scientific development, and lead to an accurate classification of fields and subfields.
- Faculty
- Faculté des sciences et de médecine
- Department
- Département de Physique
- Language
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- English
- Classification
- Physics
- License
- License undefined
- Identifiers
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- RERO DOC 28534
- DOI 10.1103/PhysRevE.84.046104
- Persistent URL
- https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/302205
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