Assessing impact and quality from local dynamics of citation networks
We show that essentially local dynamics of citation networks bring special information about the relevance/quality of a paper. Up to some rescaling, they exhibit universal behavior in citation dynamics: temporal patterns are remarkably consistent across disciplines, and uncover a prediction method for citations based on the structure of references only, at publication time. Above-average cited papers universally focus extensively on their own recent subfield  as such, citation counts essentially select what may plausibly be considered as the most disciplinary and normal science; whereas papers which have a peculiar dynamics, such as re-birthing scientific works  rediscovered classics or early birds  are comparatively poorly cited, despite their plausible relevance for the underlying communities. The rebirth index that we propose to quantify this phenomenon may be used as a complementary quality-defining criterion, in addition to final citation counts.
citation networks citation dynamics bibliometrics qualitative assessment