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Calculate Citation Cycle Time (CCT) indicator

Source: R/sniff_citations_cycle_time.R
sniff_citations_cycle_time.Rd

Calculates the Citation Cycle Time (CCT) - the average citation cycle time - to measure the pace of technological or scientific progress in a publication network. Based on Kayal (1999) methodology, the indicator measures the median age of cited publications, where lower values indicate faster technological replacement cycles.

Usage

sniff_citations_cycle_time(
  network,
  scope = "groups",
  start_year = NULL,
  end_year = NULL,
  tracked_cr_py = NULL
)

Arguments

network

Required. Network object containing publication data. For scope = "groups": object returned by sniff_groups(). For scope = "network": network object (tbl_graph or igraph).

scope

Analysis scope. Either "groups" (default) for separate group analysis or "network" for complete network analysis.

start_year, end_year

Start and end years for temporal analysis. If not specified, uses minimum and maximum years found in the data.

tracked_cr_py

Pre-processed citation year data (optional). If provided, avoids recalculating this step.

Value

A list with the following components:

data

Tibble with CCT data containing columns: group, year, index

plots

List of ggplot2 plots showing temporal evolution of CCT for each group

years_range

Vector with start and end years used in the analysis

tracked_cr_py

Complete citation year data used in calculations

Details

The Citation Cycle Time (CCT) is calculated as:

  1. For each publication, calculate the year difference between the publication and its references

  2. Calculate the median of these differences for each publication

  3. Calculate the mean of the medians for the group/network + 0.5 (Kayal adjustment)

Lower CCT values indicate that publications are citing more recent work, suggesting a faster pace of technological/scientific replacement.

References

Kayal AA, Waters RC. An empirical evaluation of the technology cycle time indicator as a measure of the pace of technological progress in superconductor technology. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. 1999;46(2):127–31. doi:10.1109/17.759138

See also

sniff_groups(), track_publications_year_from_references(), indexes_plots()

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# Group analysis
results <- sniff_citations_cycle_time(network_groups, scope = "groups")

# Network analysis
results_network <- sniff_citations_cycle_time(complete_network, scope = "network")

# Accessing results
cct_data <- results$data
plots <- results$plots

# Specifying time period
results_period <- sniff_citations_cycle_time(
  network_groups,
  start_year = 2010,
  end_year = 2020
)
} # }