Mutual Influence in Citation and Cooperation Patterns

Measuring the influence of scientists and their activities on science and society is important and indeed essential for many studies. Despite the substantial efforts devoted to exploring the influence’s measures and patterns of an individual scientific enterprise, it remains unclear how to quantify the mutual impact of multiple scientific activities. This work quantifies the relationship between the scientists’ interactive activities and their influences with different patterns in the AMiner dataset. Specifically, inflation treatment and field normalization are introduced to process the big data of paper citations as the scientist’s influence, and then the evolution of the influence is investigated for scientific activities in the citation and cooperation patterns through the Hawkes process. The results show that elite scientists have higher individual and interaction influences than ordinary scientists in all patterns found in the study, with permutation tests verifying the significance of the new findings. Moreover, the study compares the patterns found in two largest disciplines, i.e., STEM and Humanities, revealing the higher value of individual influence in STEM than in Humanities. Furthermore, it is found that the opposite trend of STEM and Humanities in the cooperation pattern suggests different cooperation habits of scientists in different disciplines. Overall, this investigation provides a feasible approach to addressing the scientific influence issue and deepening the quantitative understanding of the mutual influence of multiple scientific activities in science and society.