"New Search Method Tracks Down Influential Ideas" From News at Princeton:
Posted by Celia Walter | 26 Oct, 2010The method relies on computer algorithms to analyze how language morphs over time within a group of documents -- whether they are research papers on quantum physics or blog posts about politics -- and to determine which documents were the most influential.
"The point is being able to manage the explosion of information made possible by computers and the Internet," said David Blei, an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton and the lead researcher on the project. "We're trying to make sense of how concepts move around. Maybe you want to know who coined a certain term like 'quark,' or search old news stories to find out where the first 1960s antiwar protest took place."
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Blei and Garrish developed their algorithm to recognize the contribution of individual papers and used it to analyze several decades of reports published in three science journals: Nature, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Association for Computational Linguistics Anthology. Because they were working with scientific journals, they could compare their results with the citation counts of the papers, the traditional method of measuring scholarly impact.
They found that their results agreed with citation-based impact about 40 percent of the time. In some cases, they discovered papers that had a strong influence on the language of science, but were not often cited. In other cases, they found that papers that were cited frequently did not have much impact on the language used in a field.
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Source: Princeton University via Resourceshelf.com