A SIR epidemic model for citation dynamics

The study of citations in the scientific literature crosses the boundaries between the traditional branches of science and stands on its own as a most profitable research field dubbed the ‘science of science.’ Although the understanding of the citation histories of individual papers involves many in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:European physical journal plus Vol. 136; no. 2; p. 207
Main Authors: Reia, Sandro M., Fontanari, José F.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.02.2021
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Applied and Technical Physics
Atomic
Complex Systems
Condensed Matter Physics
Datasets
Epidemics
Epidemiology
Mathematical and Computational Physics
Mathematical models
Molecular
Optical and Plasma Physics
Parameters
Physicists
Physics
Physics and Astronomy
Regular Article
Theoretical
World War I
ISSN:2190-5444, 2190-5444
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The study of citations in the scientific literature crosses the boundaries between the traditional branches of science and stands on its own as a most profitable research field dubbed the ‘science of science.’ Although the understanding of the citation histories of individual papers involves many intangible factors, the basic assumption that citations beget citations can explain most features of the empirical citation patterns. Here, we use the SIR epidemic model as a mechanistic model for the citation dynamics of well-cited papers published in selected journals of the American Physical Society. The estimated epidemiological parameters offer insight into unknown quantities as the size of the community that could cite a paper and its ultimate impact on that community. We find a good, though imperfect, agreement between the rank of the journals obtained using the epidemiological parameters and the impact factor rank. Graphic abstract
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ISSN:2190-5444
2190-5444
DOI:10.1140/epjp/s13360-021-01199-0