Coauthorship and citation patterns in the Physical Review

Abstract

A large number of published studies have examined the properties of either networks of citation among scientific papers or networks of coauthorship among scientists. Here we study an extensive data set covering more than a century of physics papers published in the Physical Review, which allows us to construct both citation and coauthorship networks for the same set of papers. We analyze these networks to gain insight into temporal changes in citation and collaboration over the long time period of the data, as well as correlations and interactions between the two. Among other things, we investigate the change over time in the number of publishing authors, the number of papers they publish, and the number of others with whom they collaborate, changes in the typical number of citations made and received, the extent to which individuals tend to cite themselves or their collaborators more than others, the extent to which they cite themselves or their collaborators more quickly after publication, and the extent to which they tend to return the favor of a citation from another scientist.