Denis Diderot (1713-1784), French philosopher and co-founder of the modern encyclopedia.
This package allows to detect and quantify the unification or separation of two bibliographic corpora through the creation of citation networks. This tool can be used to study the spread of concepts across scientific disciplines, or the fusion/fission of scientific communities.
package
Details
Package:
Diderot
Type:
Package
Version:
0.13
Date:
2020-04-17
License:
GPL (>=2)
A typical flow of use of the package includes the following points.
First, literature metadata, including references, from the two fields of studies to analyze are downloaded from Scopus (or built manually). This data is imported to create a bibliographic dataset using create_bibliography.
Second, a graph is created with a call to build_graph to reproduce the citation network in the bibliographic dataset.
Finally, statistical analysis can be performed on the graph to assess the fusion/fission state of the two corpora/communities. Heterocitation indices (i.e. share and balance) show how much publications or authors cite papers from the other corpus (see heterocitation and heterocitation_authors respectively). Such analysis shall always be preceded by a call to precompute_heterocitation to perform initial calculations. These metrics are completed by traditional as well as custom modularity metrics (see compute_modularity and compute_custom_modularity respectively) that translate how much the communities are separated. Publications that foster mutual awareness and cross-fertilization between the corpora/communities can be identified using the usual betweeness centrality metric (see compute_BC_ranking) and the Ji index (see compute_Ji_ranking).