The evolution of a citation network topology: The development of the journal Scientometrics

By mapping the electronic database containing all papers in Scientometrics for a 26-year period (1978-2004), we uncover the topological measures that characterize the network at a given moment, as well as the time evolution of these quantities. The citation network of the journal displays the characteristic features of a “small-world” network of local dense clusters of highly specialized literature. These clusters, however, are efficiently connected into a large single component by a small number of “hub” papers that allow short-distance connection among increasingly large numbers of papers. The patterns of evolution of the network toward this “small-world” are also explored