Flows of knowledge in citation networks

Abstract

Knowledge is created and transmitted through generation. Innovation is often seen as a generative process from collective intelligence, but how does innovation emerges from the blending of accumulated knowledge, and from which path an innovation mostly inherit? A citation network can be seen as a perfect example of a generative process leading to innovation. Inspired by the notion of “stream of knowledge”, we propose to look at the question of production of knowledge under the lens of DAGs. Although many works look for the evaluation of publications, we propose to look for production of knowledge within a framework for analyzing DAGs. In this framework inspired by the work of Strahler, we can also account for other well known measures of influence such as the h-index. We propose then to analyze flows of influence in a citation networks as an ascending flow. We propose an efficient dynamic algorithm for integration with modern graph databases, conducting our experiment with the Arxiv HEP-TH dataset. Our results validate the use of DAG flows for citation flows and show evidence of the relevance of the h-index.