分类:Hotness Tracing

Hotness tracing means that when facing options, one chooses the one with the largest hotness. Such hotness can be a fashionable cloth which has been chosen by many, or a research topic which has already many publications, or a research papers which has been cited by many other papers.

We have investigated the second^[1][2], when choosing research topics to work on and publish papers in, how often a hot topic, which is measured by the accumulated (starting from certain point of time) number of papers on the topic, is chosen. Roughly speaking [math]\displaystyle{ \frac{p\left(k\right)}{n\left(k\right)} }[/math], where [math]\displaystyle{ p\left(k\right) }[/math] is the empirical distribution function the size of the topics which new papers are published on during a short period of time and [math]\displaystyle{ n\left(k\right) }[/math] is the number of topics with size [math]\displaystyle{ k }[/math]. We found that overall, all scientists trace hot topics, no matter which discipline they are in or which country they are from. However, Chinese scholars has the largest degree of hotness tracing.

There is a tiny extension can be done to this work: looking at time evolution of size of topics in various countries. There might be some countries where size of certain topics started to grow much earlier/later than other countries. To identify what are such topics for given countries might be an interesting problem. Of course, we might look into correlation between this degree of hotness tracing and other characters of papers such as age of papers, age of authors, h index of authors etc.

Furthermore, we are thinking to generalize the study of hotness tracing from publications to citations. That is to ask roughly, whether or not when a paper is heavily cited already the chance for it to get new citations is higher. This can be done simply via looking at [math]\displaystyle{ \frac{p\left(k\right)}{n\left(k\right)} }[/math], where [math]\displaystyle{ k }[/math] now becomes the number of received citations.

However, there are several subtleties when combining countries with hotness tracing in citations. Let us define a few notations. We denote all the papers from a country C as [math]\displaystyle{ P_{C} }[/math] and group papers that are cited by [math]\displaystyle{ P_{C} }[/math] as [math]\displaystyle{ P_{Cc} }[/math]. One can also separate [math]\displaystyle{ P_{Cc} }[/math] into papers from various countries, ie. [math]\displaystyle{ P^{D}_{Cc} }[/math] and [math]\displaystyle{ P_{Cc}=\sum_{D}P^{D}_{Cc} }[/math]. Ideally, by fractional counting or other means to take care of international collaboration, we should have [math]\displaystyle{ P_{D}=\sum_{C}P^{D}_{Cc} }[/math].

Then one may ask how citations from [math]\displaystyle{ P_{C} }[/math] are distributed and trace hotness or even how those citations from [math]\displaystyle{ P_{C} }[/math] but to papers from country D are distributed and trace hotness, which is to consider only [math]\displaystyle{ P^{D}_{Cc} }[/math] as the subset of references. By the way, the distribution can be quantifies for example by the Gini coefficient of the distribution.

Another thing can be investigated is to limit the references to be only papers in a country C ([math]\displaystyle{ P_{C} }[/math]) and investigate how citations from papers from all other countries is distributed and trace hotness.

All these three studies can be denoted as [math]\displaystyle{ P_{C} \rightarrow P_{All} }[/math], [math]\displaystyle{ P_{C} \rightarrow P_{D} }[/math], and [math]\displaystyle{ P_{All} \rightarrow P_{C} }[/math].

Besides hotness tracing, this study can also be regarded as part of drawing a bigger picture of Chinese research performance. Chinese has been the second largest in number of publications, but not in number of received citations (not sure how it is in terms of number of citing). The above study in fact looks at whether or not Chinese scholars publish more in hot topics, and cite only those heavily cited papers. Considering the fact that Chinese academy is still very young (a few decades old), it is quite possible that only large topics and top papers are seen by majority of Chinese scholars.

For this purpose, besides the number of papers and number of citations/citing, we would like to look into more details. For example, in the top [math]\displaystyle{ 1\%, 2\% }[/math] papers according to number of received citations or other indicators, how much percents are from China. For example, in the top [math]\displaystyle{ 1\%, 2\% }[/math] papers according to number of received citations or other indicators, how much percents are papers that are cited by Chinese scholars. The former is about research output and the latter is about scope or source of ideas of Chinese scholars.

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