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The role of mainstreamness and interdisciplinarity for the relevance of scientific papers

Fig 3

(a) Distribution of the distances of individual papers to the centers of their nearest clusters in the years 1981 (blue), 1991 (red), and 2011 (green). Over time, the distribution shifts toward smaller distances, i.e. more papers tend to appear in cluster centers. (b) The distribution of degrees over the same years shift towards much larger values (tail increases), i.e. there is a tendency to increasingly link to more similar papers. (c) Scatterplot of citations of papers published in 1991, twenty years after their publication, , versus their distance to cluster centers. The 90%, 70%, and 50% quantiles are shown in green, red, and blue, respectively. Citations increase with higher distances from clusters; bridging papers are awarded in the long run. (d) Citations, , versus their degree. A clear increase is apparent. (e) Distribution of citations for small and large values of distance. The plot is a normalized histogram of the 400 papers with the shortest distances. The blue distribution is for the 400 papers with the largest distance. (f) Distribution of citations for small and large degree.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230325.g003