1. Parametric definition of the influence of a paper in a citation network using communicability functions
- Author
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J Guillermo Contreras, Juan Antonio Pichardo-Corpus, and José Antonio de la Peña
- Subjects
Citation network ,Control and Optimization ,Computer Networks and Communications ,Computer science ,Applied Mathematics ,0211 other engineering and technologies ,021107 urban & regional planning ,010103 numerical & computational mathematics ,02 engineering and technology ,Management Science and Operations Research ,computer.software_genre ,01 natural sciences ,Computational Mathematics ,Data mining ,0101 mathematics ,computer ,Parametric statistics - Abstract
Communicability functions quantify the flow of information between two nodes of a network. In this work, we use them to explore the concept of the influence of a paper in a citation network. These functions depend on a parameter. By varying the parameter in a continuous way we explore different definitions of influence. We study six citation networks, three from physics and three from computer science. As a benchmark, we compare our results against two frequently used measures: the number of citations of a paper and the PageRank algorithm. We show that the ranking of the articles in a network can be varied from being equivalent to the ranking obtained from the number of citations to a behaviour tending to the eigenvector centrality, these limits correspond to small and large values of the communicability-function parameter, respectively. At an intermediate value of the parameter a PageRank-like behaviour is recovered. As a test case, we apply communicability functions to two sets of articles, where at least one author of each paper was awarded a Nobel Prize for the research presented in the corresponding article.
- Published
- 2019