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PageRank-Related Methods for Analyzing Citation Networks

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Measuring Scholarly Impact

Abstract

A central question in citation analysis is how the most important or most prominent nodes in a citation network can be identified. Many different approaches have been proposed to address this question. In this chapter, we focus on approaches that assess the importance of a node in a citation network based not just on the local structure of the network but instead on the network’s global structure. For instance, rather than just counting the number of citations a journal has received, these approaches also take into account from which journals the citations originate and how often these citing journals have been cited themselves. The methods that we study are closely related to the well-known PageRank method for ranking web pages. We therefore start by discussing the PageRank method, and we then review the work that has been done in the field of citation analysis on similar types of methods. In the second part of the chapter, we provide a tutorial in which we demonstrate how PageRank calculations can be performed for citation networks constructed based on data from the Web of Science database. The Sci2 tool is used to construct citation networks, and MATLAB is used to perform PageRank calculations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For an empirical analysis of the dangling nodes issue in the context of citation networks, see Yan and Ding (2011a).

  2. 2.

    In the context of citation networks, in addition to the typical value of 0.85 for the damping factor parameter, the value of 0.5 is also sometimes used. See Chen et al. (2007) for some further discussion.

  3. 3.

    See http://wiki.cns.iu.edu/display/SCI2TUTORIAL/3.2+Additional+Plugins

  4. 4.

    See http://wiki.cns.iu.edu/display/SCI2TUTORIAL/3.4+Memory+Allocation

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Ludo Waltman

  2. College of Computing and Informatics, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Erjia Yan

Authors
  1. Ludo Waltman
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  2. Erjia Yan
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Correspondence to Ludo Waltman .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

    Ying Ding

  2. University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

    Ronald Rousseau

  3. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA

    Dietmar Wolfram

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Waltman, L., Yan, E. (2014). PageRank-Related Methods for Analyzing Citation Networks. In: Ding, Y., Rousseau, R., Wolfram, D. (eds) Measuring Scholarly Impact. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10377-8_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10377-8_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-10376-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-10377-8

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