A geometric graph model for citation networks of exponentially growing scientific papers
In citation networks, the content relativity of papers is a precondition of engendering citations, which is hard to model by a topological graph. A geometric graph is proposed to predict some features of the citation networks with exponentially growing papers, which addresses the precondition by using coordinates of nodes to model the research contents of papers, and geometric distances between nodes to diversities of research contents between papers. Citations between modeled papers are drawn according to a geometric rule, which addresses the precondition as well as some other factors engendering citations, namely academic influences of papers, aging of those influences, and incomplete copying of references. Instead of cumulative advantage of degree, the model illustrates that the scale free property of modeled networks arises from the inhomogeneous academic influences of modeled papers. The model can also reproduce some other statistical features of citation networks, e.g. in and out assortativities, which show the model provides a suitable tool to understand some aspects of citation networks by geometry.