Measuring discursive influence across scholarship.

ABSTRACT: Assessing scholarly influence is critical for understanding the collective system of scholarship and the history of academic inquiry. Influence is multifaceted, and citations reveal only part of it. Citation counts exhibit preferential attachment and follow a rigid "news cycle" that can miss sustained and indirect forms of influence. Building on dynamic topic models that track distributional shifts in discourse over time, we introduce a variant that incorporates features, such as authorship, affiliation, and publication venue, to assess how these contexts interact with content to shape future scholarship. We perform in-depth analyses on collections of physics research (500,000 abstracts; 102 years) and scholarship generally (JSTOR repository: 2 million full-text articles; 130 years). Our m

SUBMITTER: Gerow A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5879694 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature