Network Analysis of the Science of Science: A Case Study in SOFSEM Conference

A rising issue in the scientific community entails the identification of temporal patterns in the evolution of the scientific enterprise and the emergence of trends that influence scholarly impact. In this direction, this paper investigates the mechanism with which citation accumulation occurs over time and how this affects the overall impact of scientific output. Utilizing data regarding the SOFSEM Conference (International Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science), we study a corpus of 1006 publications with their associated authors and affiliations to uncover the effects of collaboration network on the conference output. We proceed to group publications into clusters based on the trajectories they follow in their citation acquisition. Representative patterns are identified to characterize dominant trends of the conference, while exploring phenomena of early and late recognition by the scientific community and their correlation with impact.