Interdisciplinarity revealed by transitive reduction of citation networks
File(s)
Published version (article in press)
Author(s)
AlMuhanna, Haya
Vasiliauskaite, Vaiva
Evans, Tim S
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
We investigate the impact of transitive reduction on citation networks. Our hypothesis is that documents which lose fewer citations under transitive reduction are likely to be multi-class (our definition of interdisciplinary), while a large loss of citations suggests a document is primarily cited within a single class. We test this hypothesis by using an artificial model of a citation network and by using data on citations from three sources: academic papers, court decisions and patents. Where needed, we applied modularity-based clustering techniques on a network defined using the undirected version of the citation network to classify documents by communities. A cluster-dependent measure was then used to classify the nodes as multi-class or single-class. Our results provide strong support for our hypothesis in all four cases.
Date Issued
2026-09-22
Date Acceptance
2026-09-07
Citation
Scientific Reports, 2026
ISSN
2045-2322
Publisher
Nature Portfolio
Journal / Book Title
Scientific Reports
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2026 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Publication Status
Published online
Date Publish Online
2026-09-22