A spatiotemporal scientometrics framework for exploring the citation impact of publications and scientists

What is it about?

In this work we focus on the study of citations and present a spatiotemporal scientometrics framework to measure the citation impact of research output by taking physical space, place, and time into account. Specifically, we use the statistics of categorical places (institutions, cities, and countries), spatiotemporal kernel density estimations, cartograms, distance distribution curves, and point-pattern analysis to identify spatiotemporal citation patterns. Moreover, we propose a series of s-indices, such as S_institution-index, S_city-index, and S_country-index to evaluate a scientist's impact as a complement to non-spatial citation indicators, e.g., h-index and g-index. In addition, we have developed an interactive web application which allows users to visually explore research topics, authors, publications, as well as the spread of citations through space and time. Our work offers insights on the role of location in scientific knowledge diffusion.

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Why is it important?

The research field of scientometrics is concerned with measuring and analyzing science. In practice, this is often done by restricting the impact of publications, journals, and researchers to a mere frequency. However, scientific activities (co-publication, citation, labor mobility) display clear spatiotemporal patterns, and such patterns have rarely been considered in traditional scientometrics. In this research, we present a spatiotemporal framework for scientometric studies.