Using path-based approaches to examine the dynamic structure of discipline-level citation networks: 1997-2011

The objective of this paper is to identify the dynamic structure of several time-dependent discipline-level citation networks through a path-based method. A network data set is prepared that comprises 27 subjects and their citations aggregated from more than 27,000 journals and proceedings indexed in the Scopus database. A maximum spanning tree method is employed to extract paths in the weighted, directed, and cyclic networks. This paper finds that subjects such as Medicine, Biochemistry, Chemistry, Materials Science, Physics, and Social Sciences are the ones with multiple branches in the spanning tree. This paper also finds that most paths connect science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields; two critical paths connecting STEM and non-STEM fields are the one from Mathematics to Decision Sciences and the one from Medicine to Social Sciences.