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Identifying 'seed' papers in sciences

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Abstract

A concise quantitative method is established for identifying ‘seed’ papers in sciences. The method is set up following h-type metrics based on co-citation network analysis. With defining original-seed (O-Seed) and dominant-seed (D-Seed) by measurable h-strength and second-order h-type degree centrality, O-seed resembles to be a ‘root’ and D-seed develops to become ‘stem’. Using dataset from Web of Science (WoS), the ‘seed’ papers in research fields of graphene, genome editing, and h-set studies are identified. Graphene D-Seed paper and genome editing D-Seed paper are representative outputs of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics and the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry respectively. H-set O-Seed and D-Seed are the same paper that first proposed the concept of h-index. The ‘seed’ papers are characterized by not only high citations, but also network structure and core function in sciences.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China Grants No. 71673131.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Management, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Jean J. Wang, Sarah X. Shao & Fred Y. Ye

  2. Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Data Engineering and Knowledge Service, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Jean J. Wang, Sarah X. Shao & Fred Y. Ye

  3. International Joint Informatics Laboratory, Nanjing University–University of Illinois, Nanjing-Champaign, China

    Jean J. Wang, Sarah X. Shao & Fred Y. Ye

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  1. Jean J. Wang
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  2. Sarah X. Shao
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  3. Fred Y. Ye
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Correspondence to Fred Y. Ye.

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Wang, J.J., Shao, S.X. & Ye, F.Y. Identifying 'seed' papers in sciences. Scientometrics 126, 6001–6011 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03980-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03980-5

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