A novel developmental trajectory discovery approach by integrating main path analysis and intermediacy

As a widely used technique for discovering developmental trajectory of a specific field of science and technology, main path analysis armed with global search strategy prefers longer citation paths rather than shorter ones. An obvious feature of longer main paths is that the theme of documents may not be so coherent, though longer paths may provide more details on the development of a field than shorter ones. Thereupon, a new measure, named as intermediacy, was proposed in the literature for recognising important scientific publications. However, the intermediacy is only applicable to the citation network with one single target node and one single source node. For purpose of loosening this limitation of the intermediacy and benefitting from main path analysis and intermediacy, this work raises an alternative approach for discovering developmental trajectory by combining node importance and edge importance via edge and node integrated modes. Extensive experimental results on the weak signals and education fields indicate that similar trajectories can be obtained through these two integrated modes, and richer implications can be encoded in our discovered trajectories than those from main path analysis and intermediacy. In addition, our framework is able to scale very well to a large citation network.