About Me
I’m Elaina — I’m an iCAN student (2021-2022 cohort) at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a DREAM fellow. I got my B.A. in Linguistics from Reed College in 2019, where I discovered a love of data wrangling and experimental design. My current interests fall broadly under data science and human-computer interaction with a focus on dissemination of knowledge and designing more intuitive systems.
About My Advisor
George Chacko is a Research Associate Professor of Computer Science at UIUC and Executive Director of Research Analytics at the Grainger College of Engineering. His research interests span novelty in science, research impact, knowledge diffusion, and the structure of research communities. More generally, his research involves scientometrics.
About My Project
My study builds upon the concepts of breadth and depth as described by Bu, Waltman, and Huang (2021) in revisiting the study by Leng (2022). Leng (2022) used network analysis and qualitative assessments to evaluate the impact of the paper by Paul, whose negative results challenged existing thought on the diet-heart hypothesis in an influential article in 1963.
Findings show that Paul et al. (1963) is broad at the onset of publication, but deepens over the course of its lifespan, contrasting conclusions presented by Leng (2022). It is likely that the breadth and depth metrics used in this study are better suited to distinguish publications cited for methodology from those cited for their discoveries. As such, I suggest that breadth and depth be weighted differently for methods papers and research articles to better distinguish differences in citation patterns within a single publication category.
Future research might compare the breadth of Paul et al. (1963) to other highly-cited research articles published around the same time to determine whether there is any meaningful difference between the breadths of research articles. Additionally, further developement needs to be done on methodologies that examine the breadth of a research article without holding it to the same standards as a tool or methods paper.
Many thanks to Franklin Moy, current Electrical and Computer Engineering senior at UIUC, for graciously allowing me to use his code for calculating the Bu et al. (2021) metrics and for his help with troubleshooting.
Resources
Impact Assessment Project - Paper
Impact Assessment Project - Presentation
Code and Data Relevant to Impact Assessment Project