Scientific X-ray: Scanning and quantifying the idea evolution of scientific publications
Fig 1
The framework of scientific X-ray.
We illustrate the pipeline utilizing two publications with different citation structures. (a) Retrieve the citing papers of the target publication, all links among the target publication and citing articles and all links among citing papers in the database. (b) Construct the citation network of the target publication based on the retrieval results. (c) Extract the idea tree from the citation network to reveal the flow of the target publication’s idea. (d) Utilize Knowledge Entropy (KE) to quantify the knowledge quality of nodes in the idea tree to highlight the powerful inheritor of the target idea. (e) Reproduce the evolution of the idea tree and quantify the degree of development of the target publication’s idea utilizing the Valid Depth (VD). (f) Utilize the Development Potential Index (DPI) to quantify the potential of the target publication and assess whether it is worth continuing to follow.