Evaluate the Egocentric Citation Network of "Aerospace Engineering" and "Nuclear Technology"

This research aimed to measure the dependence and independence of documents in an Ego-centered citation network to evaluate the quality of scientific outputs in two subject areas "aerospace engineering" and "nuclear technology."

The present study is applied research and belongs to the category of scientometrics research. In the first step, the required data for creating ego-centric citation networks were extracted and stored from the Web of Science Core Collection (WOSCC) through web scraping (automated data extraction from websites) using the Mimfa Scraper (a software for automated data extraction) and the JavaScript programming language. Afterward, algorithm coding was performed in the MiMFa RAVAR DataLab, and the programming language C# was utilized to answer the research question.

The research findings showed that the study conducted by Allison (2016) with 1535 citations is the most cited document in the field of nuclear technology and ranks first in terms of absolute dependence index. In comparison to the number of references in Allison's paper, 80 percent of the alters in Li's research (2018), the second most cited paper in terms of the absolute dependence index (512 citations), cited ego-related references (58 references); however, this percentage is 46 percent in Allison's paper. A study conducted by Shin has obtained the highest absolute independence index (2015 citations) compared to other highly cited articles in the field of nuclear technology. Leppanen's study (2015) ranks first in terms of the relative independence index with a score of 98 percent compared to other highly cited documents in the field of nuclear technology. Ricker (2015), along with 57 co-authors, has the highest number of citations (1542 citations) in aerospace engineering. Among these citations, 647 alters have cited the documents cited by the ego and obtained the highest absolute dependence index score. Wang's research (2020), with 52 citations, is the first paper to rank the relative independence index in the field of aerospace engineering.

The results indicate that the level of relative dependence was higher than independence in both subject areas. Moreover, as the number of citations increases, both absolute dependence and independence increase; however, relative dependence decreases. Additionally, in recent years, the absolute dependence and independence indices have lower values than older years. However, the relative dependence index positively correlates with the year of publication. Moreover, the relative independence index positively correlates with the number of citations; its value has increased in recent years and the number of ego sources does not directly correlate with the increase in the dependence index.