Self-citations, co-authorships and keywords: A new approach to scientists’ field mobility?

It is shown that author’s self-citation patterns reveal important information on the development and emergence of new research topics over time, and a network based definition of field mobility is introduced, using the Optimal Percolation Method.

Abstract

This paper introduces a new approach to detecting scientists’ field mobility by focusing on an author’s self-citation network, and the co-authorships and keywords in self-citing articles. Contrary to much previous literature on self-citations, we will show that author’s self-citation patterns reveal important information on the development and emergence of new research topics over time. More specifically, we will discuss self-citations as a means to detect scientists’ field mobility. We introduce a network based definition of field mobility, using the Optimal Percolation Method ( Lambiotte & Ausloos , 2005; 2006). The results of the study can be extended to selfcitation networks of groups of authors and, generally also for other types of networks.