The large-scale structure of journal citation networks

Abstract: We analyse the large-scale structure of the journal citation network built from information contained in the Thomson-Reuters Journal Citation Reports. To this end, we take advantage of the network science paraphernalia and explore network properties like density, percolation robustness, average and largest node distances, reciprocity, incoming and outgoing degree distributions, as well as assortative mixing by node degrees. We discover that the journal citation network is a dense, robust, small, and reciprocal world. Furthermore, in and out node degree distributions display long-tails, with few vital journals and many trivial ones, and they are strongly positively correlated.