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Geographical knowledge diffusion and spatial diversity citation rank

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Abstract

This paper proposes a citation rank based on spatial diversity (SDCR) in terms of cities and countries, focusing on the measurement of the “spatial” aspect in citation networks. Our main goal is to solve the citation bias caused by different geographical locations of citations. We empirically investigate spatial properties of citing distances, citation patterns and spatial diversity to understand geographical knowledge diffusion, based on the data from “Transportation Science and Technology” subject category in the Web of Science (1966–2009). We also compare the proposed ranking method with other bibliometric measures, and conduct a case study to figure out the recent ranks of the well-established authors in Transportation research. It is found that the SDCR of a focal author is highly correlated with the sum of spatial diversity weights (“strength”) of all his in-links, and it is better to set the damping factors smaller than 0.75 when ranking authors with various initial academic years by SDCR. The cases show that Hong Kong is becoming a cluster in Transportation research.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no.: 71101059) and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (grant no.: 201104436). This work was also partially supported by the Future and Emerging Technologies programme FP7-COSI-ICT of the European Commission through project QLectives (grant no.: 231200). The author thanks Prof. Dirk Helbing and Dr. Sergi Lozano for their constructive discussions and comments. We also warmly thank two anonymous referees for their suggestions.

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  1. School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Jiang Wu

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  1. Jiang Wu
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Correspondence to Jiang Wu.

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Wu, J. Geographical knowledge diffusion and spatial diversity citation rank. Scientometrics 94, 181–201 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0715-8

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