The large-scale structure of journal citation networks

We analyze the large-scale structure of the journal citation network built from information contained in the Thomson-Reuters Journal Citation Reports. To this end, we explore network properties such as density, percolation robustness, average and largest node distances, reciprocity, incoming and outgoing degree distributions, and assortative mixing by node degrees. We discover that the journal citation network is a dense, robust, small, and reciprocal world. Furthermore, in- and outdegree node distributions display long tails, with few vital journals and many trivial ones, and they are strongly positively correlated.