Week 10

Objectives

  • Refining figures to be used in my final report
    • The figure below shows the number of citations that Paul et al. (1963) earned per year over the course of its first 20 years. It shows that the maximum citations received per year hit a peak in 1967, three years after publication, followed by peaks and valleys occurring over the remaining years. Paul et al. receives more citations than expected over the course of 20 years, as many papers stop receiving citations after 10 years (de Solla Price, 1965). Leng (2022) attributes this spike in citations from the mid-to-late 70s to an increased interest in how alcohol consumption may contribute to the development of coronary heart disease, as Paul et al. (1963) was one of the first to report findings related to alcohol.

The number of citations Paul et al. (1963) earned each year over the first twenty years of publication. The paper received the maximum number of citation per year in 1967, with peaks and valleys following over time. Surprisingly, Paul et al. (1963) continued to earn citations even 15 to 20 years after publication. Leng (2022) attributes this to a new interest in a potential correlation between alcohol consumption and CHD that began in the mid-to-late 70's.

  • This figure plots the ratio of breath and depth over the course of twenty years, with a 50:50 ratio being marked by the gray horizontal line. This image shows that for the first two years of publication, Paul et al. (1963) was considered to be much more broad than deep. Past this point, however, Paul et al. (1963) can be considered to be much more deep than broad, and depth increases over time while breadth decreases. Notably, breadth actually increases in 1971, which is an item of interest for myself that I have not yet investigated.

The ratio of citing papers classified as 'broad' (blue) vs. those classified as 'deep' (orange) for Paul et al. (1963). The grey line indicates a ratio of 0.5, the point at which Paul et al. (1963) has equal breadth and depth. This point occurs around 1966, after which the ratio of depth increases over time while the ratio of breadth decreases. In the first year of publication, there are more 'broad' nodes than deep ones (0.75 to 0.25). After three years, there's nearly an even split (0.46 to 0.53), but the percentage of 'deep' nodes continues to grow while the percentage of 'broad' ones decreases.

  • Data Validity Problem
    • I decided to abandon my doi matching idea and extract the Paul et al. citations directly from Web of Science (WoS) myself, following Leng’s methodology. I got 6 fewer citations than Leng did, but fishing out the items that didn’t match my data set, I was able to manually look them up in WoS and see if their references included citations to Paul et al. (1963). All of them did, though they were missing page numbers or had typos that possibly contributed to the mis-match in search results. I decided to use all of Leng’s data, only filtering out articles written in a language other than English.
  • More Figures
    • I’ve also been working on visualizations using data from this project using the JavaScript library D3. This project is still ongoing, but when finished, it will be hosted here.
Written on July 22, 2022