Abstract:

The principal source of spreading knowledge are papers. During their publishing process, they are assigned to one or more categories, f. e., the Nature database posts each publication to only one knowledge category. Hence, each referenced paper is a root of the citation tree, and its contribution to the development of the categories is higher than in the case of the not-referenced article. This article presents the paper's contribution to the development of knowledge categories not only by the fact of publication but also by the fact of being cited. The optimistic fuzzy aggregation norm is applied for calculating the category vectors presenting the article's contribution to the Nature categories. Moreover, the transitive closure showing the whole matrix of citations is built. The identical quantum of knowledge for calculating the contribution to science lets us estimate the level of the contribution to science of the article by using the network of referencing articles. Knowledge is divided into disciplines, so it is possible to develop vectors with components presenting the levels of different categories' contributions together with the transitive closure of this network.