Scientific Influence

Abstract

Researchers in scientific specialties and invisible colleges tend to cite each other in their written communications and especially in the Journals devoted to those specialities Such citations form a network through which there are many influence paths The main paths through such citation networks contain the key intellectual developments in these scientific fields If a specialty hangs together as a coherent field of research, one would expect that the citations within the field's journal should reflect the history ofthatfield and exhibit the degree of interconnectedness among the different researchers and their special subgroups Further, to the extent that a field is self-contained (i e , not borrowing on other fields for its key intellectual developments), the citation network within the journal should contain one or more main paths on which are located many of the key intellectual developments of the field These ideas are tested using citations in fifteen volumes of the Journal of Conflict Resolution published from 1957 to 1971