Abstract

Which scientific fields export the most intellectual influence, through recent research, to other fields? Citation behaviour varies greatly across disciplines, making inter-field comparisons difficult. Recent approaches to measuring influence in networks, based on the PageRank algorithm, take the source of citations (or recommendations or links) into account.

By aggregating all publications in each Web of Science field into "super-journals", we model the exchange of citations between fields. We then fit a Bradley–Terry paired comparisons model—which can be shown to be equivalent to scaled PageRank—to measure the relative influence of academic communities. Uncertainty intervals can quantify the robustness of the ranking.