Citation Communities

Networks of Names

Citation relations can be represented as graphs in which the works are nodes and the citations are links that connect some nodes but not others. Citing and cited documents can thus be rendered as networks, making graphtheoretical research on networks, especially social networks, applicable to citation data. Human communities are often studied as networks of relations between pairs of persons, and citation communities can similarly be studied by examining relations between pairs of documents. Documents, after all, are in some sense surrogates for the persons who wrote them, and, just as the attributes of persons can be used in social analysis, the attributes of both citing and cited documents can be used in analyzing citation communities.

Usually, however, the term community refers not to a set of documents but to a group of persons with shared attributes. The term citation community thus implies that the linked authors are to be understood as persons, whether they appear as citers or citees. Hence, for studying community, the key attribute of documents is authors' names, with their interesting duality of meaning. Names can be shorthand for documents, but they also evoke people. An analyst can write “E. O. Wilson” or “S. J. Gould” and mean two books or two papers in a network, but she or he can also mean two famous contemporary biologists. Using the latter interpretation, the analyst can add to the study of documents any relations that might hold between their authors as persons, such as whether they knew each other or worked in the same place or exchanged e-mail. The analyst can ask such [Page 142]questions as “What other marks of community do these authors share?” “Does their relatedness through citation correlate with particular social ties or communication behaviors?” “Do any of these other variables cause citation?” “Does citation cause any of them?” “Is the community formed by intellectual ties or by social ties?” “Does it exhibit lines of conflict?” The answers depend on the other variables used to interpret the citation ties.

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