Abstract
The creative process is essentially Darwinian, and only a small proportion of creative ideas have been selected for further development. This article builds a diffusion–adoption model of academic articles and re-explores the influencing factors of “highly used but rarely cited” and “lowly used but highly cited” papers. Looking through the lens of Rogers’s innovation diffusion theory provides a new perspective on the citation mechanism and advances our understanding of what citation counts measure. Here, we take highly used (top 1%) articles published in the year 2013 in Web of Science as examples of the most successfully diffused papers and classify these articles into four groups, based on the Boston consulting group matrix. We then classify the diffusion and adoption of these articles into three stages, namely: idea gatekeeping, idea spreading, and action, and compare the difference between question mark and rising star articles on funding, number of references, publishing time, journal quartile, and number of authors. Results show that publishing time (β = 1.820) and usage count (β = 0.899) act as positive independents, and references (β = − 0.016) act as a negative independent to the adoption rate of rising star articles (p < 0.05, adjusted \(R^{2}\) = 0.67). Journal quartile (β = 1.952), funding (β = 1.071), usage count (β = 0.033), and references (β = 0.005) act as positive independents, and number of authors (β = − 0.002) and publishing time (β = − 0.717) act as negative independents to the adoption rate of question mark articles (p < 0.05, adjusted \(R^{2}\) = 0.119).
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Acknowledgements
This contribution is based upon work supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71974030) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China. We acknowledge the support of the Chinese Scholarship Council. The authors would like to thank Lizhi Xing for his discussion on this study.
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Liang, G., Hou, H., Chen, Q. et al. Diffusion and adoption: an explanatory model of “question mark” and “rising star” articles. Scientometrics 124, 219–232 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03478-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03478-6