Clustering citation histories in the Physical Review

We investigate publications through their citation histories – the history events are the citations given to the article by younger publications and the time of the event is the date of publication of the citing article. We propose a methodology, based on spectral clustering, to group citation histories, and the corresponding publications, into communities and apply multinomial logistic regression to provide the revealed communities with semantics in terms of publication features. We study the case of publications from the full Physical Review archive, covering 120 years of physics in all its domains. We discover two clear archetypes of publications – marathoners and sprinters – that deviate from the average middle-of-the-roads behaviour, and discuss some publication features, like age of references and type of publication, that are correlated with the membership of a publication into a certain community.