Citation Network Analysis of a Computer Science Conference
Clement Lee
2019-05-24 (Fri)
Background
- Previously postdoc at Newcastle University
Themes
Digital Civics
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
- Designing digital technology with people in mind
ACM CHI Conference
… on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Old Wine in a New Bottle
- Bibliometrics is old
- Works within CHI
Current approaches
- Text approach
- Changing meanings of words
- Some words dominating the field, e.g. “design”, “user”, etc.
- Network approach
- Focus usually on collaboration networks
- Availability of data
- Other databases not very helpful
Scope
- Gather the references of all CHI papers from 1981 to 2018
- Digital Library ID useful for identifying papers
- Construct the citation network within >6000 papers
- Cluster the papers - methods for social networks
- Examine the clusters
- Do they represent different topics/themes?
- How is the trend over the years?
Stochastic Block Models
- Statistical models for clustering relational data
- Properly defined by model assumptions
- Pros
- One definitive set of results (theoretically)
- Can resolve issues with community detection
- Cons
- Not off the shelf
- Slow / difficult to scale
Difference
- Nodes (papers) are tightly connected within each cluster
- Low connectivity between clusters
Stochastic block models
- Same connectivity for any pair of nodes in two clusters
- Not guaranteed to be high or low
- Existence of miscellaneous group
Ongoing Work
- Results of modelling & interpretation
- Predictions
- Download statistics may be useful
- Improve the app …
(https://xkcd.com/2054/)
Observations
- Usefulness of metadata
- Good system of indexing papers or data in general
- Interdisciplinary & dynamic nature
- Extension to other fields
Links
The CHI paper
- Lee, C., Garbett, A., Wang, J., Hu, B. and Jackson, D. (2019), Weaving the topics of CHI: Using citation network analysis to explore emerging trends.
- Digital Library ID: 3312776
This presentation
