Bibliometrics/Citation Networks

In addition to shaping social networks, for example, in terms of coauthorship relations, scientific communications induce and reproduce cognitive structures. Scientific literature is intellectually organized in terms of disciplines and specialties; these structures are reproduced and networked reflexively by making references to the authors, concepts, and texts embedded in these literatures. The concept of a cognitive structure was introduced in social network analysis (SNA) in 1987 by David Krackhardt, but the focus in SNA has hitherto been on cognition as a psychological attribute of human agency. In bibliometrics, and in science and technology studies (STS) more generally, sociocognitive structures refer to intellectual organization at the supra-individual level. This intellectual organization emerges and is reproduced by the collectives of authors who are organized not only in terms of interpersonal relations, but also more abstractly in terms of codes of communication that are field-specific. Citations can serve as indicators of this codification process.

Citation indexing has a long tradition: Bella Weinberg mentions that the first citation index for the Talmud was printed in Italy between 1522 and 1524. However, the modern citation (with its standardized format) and the modern citation index can be considered as textual [Page 73]innovations that enable scholars to communicate across different literatures. The science citation indices were shaped by Eugene Garfield at the Institute of Scientific Information in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1965, the historian of science Derek de Solla Price wrote a foundational article for this field of study titled Networks of Scientific Papers. Price proposed to study, among other things, the preferential attachment mechanism among scientific papers in terms of a negatively exponential function (in STS also known as Robert Merton's [1968] “Matthew effect”), aggregated journal-journal citation networks as an operationalization of specialty structures, and the dynamics of articles and reviews in terms of variation, selection, and retention mechanisms.