Logo image
Characterizing the Citation Graph as a Self-Organizing Networked Information Space
Book chapter   Peer reviewed

Characterizing the Citation Graph as a Self-Organizing Networked Information Space

Yuan An, Jeannette C. M. Janssen and Evangelos E. Milios
Innovative Internet Computing Systems
2002

Abstract

Bodies of information available through the Internet, such as digital librarises and distributed file-sharing systems, often form a self-organizing networked information space, i.e. a collection of interconnected information entities generated incrementally over time by a large number of agents. The collection of electronically available research papers in Computer Science, linked by their citations, form a good example of such a space. In this work we present a study of the structure of the citation graph of computer science literature. Using a web robot we build several citation graphs from parts of the digital library ResearchIndex. After verifying that the degree distributions follow a power law, we apply a series of graph theoretical algorithms to elicit an aggregate picture of the citation graph in terms of its connectivity. The results expand our insight into the structure of self-organizing networked information spaces, and may inform the design of focused crawlers searching such a space for topic-specific information.

Metrics

5 Record Views
4 citations in Scopus

Details

InCites Highlights

Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:

Web of Science research areas
Computer Science, Information Systems
Computer Science, Theory & Methods
Logo image