The web of citation links connecting academic papers — backward citation chaining follows references to foundational work; forward chaining finds papers that have cited a given work.
A citation network is the graph formed by treating documents as nodes and citations between them as directed edges, so that a body of literature can be examined as structure rather than as a reading list. Building one is a sequence of modelling decisions: which document types count, whether self-citations are included, how references are matched to records, and which database supplies the edges. Different studies answer those questions differently and get different graphs. No organisation owns the term or fixes the conventions. Bibliometricians disagree productively about what the resulting structures mean — whether a citation signals influence, disagreement, or ritual — and a citation to one research group’s working definition would elevate it above the rest.
Why this entry carries no source list. This lexicon cites an official primary source wherever one exists, and says so plainly where none does. No body governs this term. There is no standards organisation for it, no register, and no text whose authors could claim to have settled its meaning. Methods literature describes practice and argues about it; a citation to one author would dress a position in a live argument as a rule, which would mislead more than silence does. What follows is the convention as it is actually used, with the disagreements named rather than smoothed over.