Main path analysis: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:39, 16 August 2017

Revision as of 01:18, 17 August 2017

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== History ==

Main path analysis is first propoed in Hummon and Doreian<ref name=":0" /> in which they suggest a different approach for analyzing a citation network "where the connective threads through a network are preserved and the focus is on the links in the network rather than on the nodes."<ref name=":0" /> They call the resulting chain of the most used citation links "main path" and claim that "It is our intuition that the main path, selected on the basis of the most used path will identify the main stream of a literature." The idea was verified using a set of DNA research articles. To make the method more practical, Liu and Lu<ref name=":1">{{Cite journal|last=Liu|first=John S.|last2=Lu|first2=Louis Y.Y.|date=2012-03-01|title=An integrated approach for main path analysis: Development of the Hirsch index as an example|url=http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.21692/abstract|journal=Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology|language=en|volume=63|issue=3|pages=528–542|doi=10.1002/asi.21692|issn=1532-2890}}</ref> proposed the key-route search. The most useful feature of the key-route search is that one is able to view different level of main paths by adjusting the number key-routesroute numbers.

== The method ==

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==== Key-route search ====

Key-route search is designed to avoid the problem of missing significant links in both the local and global search. As described in Liu and Lu (2012)<ref name=":1" />, the approach searches main paths from the specified links (key-routes) thus guarantees the inclusion of the links in the main paths. Other notable advantage of the key-route approach is that by varying the number of key-routes one is able to obtain main paths in different details. The larger the number of key-route is specified, the more detail is given. When the number of key-route increases to a certain point the search returns the whole citation network.

Key-route search<ref name=":1">{{Cite journal|last=Liu|first=John S.|last2=Lu|first2=Louis Y.Y.|date=2012-03-01|title=An integrated approach for main path analysis: Development of the Hirsch index as an example|url=http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.21692/abstract|journal=Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology|language=en|volume=63|issue=3|pages=528–542|doi=10.1002/asi.21692|issn=1532-2890}}</ref> is designed to avoid the problem of missing significant links in both the local and global search.

== The Variants ==

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=== Academic article ===

Academic citation databases such as [[Web of Science]] and [[Scopus]] includes comprehensive citation information thus make it possible to apply main path analysis to trace knowledge flow of any scientific fields.

=== Patent ===

Patents referencing prior arts is also a common practice. Most of the patent database contain patent citation information. Verspagen (2004)

=== Legal case ===