Fuzzy logic in knowledge dissemination due to citation trees. Contribution to discipline vector

Abstract

Large sets of articles are evaluated by predefined measures such as the article numbers and h-indexes. All of these indicators are scalars and refer rather to one discipline or the comprehensive science. Thus, according to disciplinary categories in scientific databases, the distribution has become too rigid for current science needs, dynamically growing towards inter- and trans-disciplinarity. We propose a new method of calculating the impact on knowledge of articles and their citations, creating citation networks, and using one of the optimistic fuzzy aggregation norms to estimate the contribution to the knowledge considering the citation inheritance of citing papers to cited papers (paper children to the paper-parents). Due to this method, we produced the contribution vectors for various disciplines/subdisciplines based on articles and their citations of publications belonging to the considered disciplines. We can prepare the scientific profiles of papers and disciplines based on the contribution vectors. Moreover, we can evaluate how much citations matter in the development of science. Applying this method, we can estimate the contribution to the considered research field caused by papers and their citations from different areas of science. The proposed method might be applicable in the assessment of developing concepts.