Depth analysis: What happens after papers stand on the giant’s shoulder?

Abstract

Scholarly impact has been investigated with great enthusiasm. Scholarly activity has been understood to be accumulative, as Isaac Newton’s famous quote –stand on the giant’s shoulder– indicates, and citation reflects such act of knowledge accumulation and development. While citation count is indeed a robust indicator for academic assessment, given the accumulative and back-to-back nature of academic work, is limited since it does not take descending activities of a paper into consideration. This study suggests a novel approach, the Depth Analysis, which scrutinises descending papers – papers that stood on the giant’s shoulder. Also, novel Depth-based paper assessment method and knowledge structure analysis approach are presented. To validate the method, a case study on conference papers in neural computing domain is conducted. The study result shows that Depth Analysis can capture diachronic scholarly impact and knowledge structure shift more thoroughly.