Elaina Wittmer

Home Institution
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year Participated
2022

Year in School
iCAN

REU Faculty Mentor
George Chacko

Research Area Interest
Data and Information Systems

Project Title
Dimension in a Single-Study Citation Network

Biography & Research Abstract

Abstract:

Bu et al. (2021) propose four new metrics used to provide new dimensions to citation counts: breadth, depth, dependence, and independence. This project uses the concepts of breath and depth to answer a question proposed in Leng (2022): Given a network composed of one paper and its citing papers, which communities are inward-facing and which are outward-facing? Additionally, for this single paper, how might these measures of breadth and depth evolve over time? Preliminary findings suggest that papers have higher levels of breadth following publication, but some papers gain depth as research communities cite this paper as well as other papers in the network. Findings also suggest that whether a given community in this network is inward-facing or outward-facing may be partially explained by when it began developing and/or how closely the research topic relates to the previous literature.

Bio:

Elaina Wittmer received her Bachelor's degree in Linguistics from Reed College before returning to her home state of Illinois to join the 2021-2022 iCAN cohort. Her research interests lie broadly in the realm of data science and experimental design, though her current, more specific interests lie in graph theory, networks, and data visualization.