Infrastructure of Scientometrics: The Big and Network Picture

A network is a set of nodes connected via edges, with possibly directions and weights on the edges. Sometimes, in a multi-layer network, the nodes can also be heterogeneous. In this perspective, based on previous studies, we argue that networks can be regarded as the infrastructure of scientometrics in the sense that networks can be used to represent scientometric data. Then the task of answering various scientometric questions related to this data becomes an algorithmic problem in the corresponding network.