Measuring preferential attachment mechanism in citation network basing on sliding time windows

The preferential attachment mechanism (PAM) in citation network is studied dependent on papers' past citations obtained in different time windows. Experiment shows that the correlation between papers' attachment rate Π(k,t) and the past citations reaches peak in time window t=1, but then decays continually when enlarging the time window gradually. It indicates that the citations obtained in the recent one-year period will be the kernel factor to determine papers' attachment property. And negative effects would be brought to PAM if more citations in larger time windows were considered. Basing on the past citations obtained in t=1, the traditional PAM was modified as Π(k,t)”k
1
. Experiment shows that the modified PAM has acquired a very good linear dependence between Π(k,t) and the citations in t=1.