The Structure of Science Itself

SEEDmagazine.com interviews Carl Bergstrom, whose eigenfactor project uses citation databases to map networks of information sharing within science:

We find papers to read by following citation trails. If you have an eigenfactor of 1.5, it means 1.5% of the time, a researcher following citation trails is actually trying to get an article from your journal. . . How do you make the right connections, right? How do you make the critical connections to move thought forward? If you can solve a problem like that, or even just make a little contribution to it, it really accelerates science in a wonderful way. And so by using the structure of citation networks from paper to paper, you can do things like you can find the key papers in a discipline, you can find the papers that have suddenly become very hot, you can find the papers that were foundational in bringing together two different ideas.

See the video after the fold. . .

Via Virginia Hughes.