Abstract

Finding idea-flow channels in a research network is an important issue because the channels influence the performance of a researcher. We developed a metric called followness that measures how closely in time one author gets ideas from another author. Followness is a sum of citation counts each weighted by citation delays. A network of authors constructed from the follow relations reveals fast idea-flow channels among authors. Using the Web of Science data for a prestigious journal in computer science, we show that the followness is more correlated to an author’s productivity and the quality of an author’s work than the number of coauthors or the citation count. Moreover, follow networks reveal idea-flow channels faster than those of coauthorship networks and citation networks. In addition, authors in a follow relation have a stronger relation than authors in a citation relation in terms of the degree, the connectivity, and the mutuality of the relation.