  The paper citation network is a traditional social medium for the exchange of
ideas and knowledge. In this paper we view citation networks from the
perspective of information diffusion. We study the structural features of the
information paths through the citation networks of publications in computer
science, and analyze the impact of various citation choices on the subsequent
impact of the article. We find that citing recent papers and papers within the
same scholarly community garners a slightly larger number of citations on
average. However, this correlation is weaker among well-cited papers implying
that for high impact work citing within one's field is of lesser importance. We
also study differences in information flow for specific subsets of citation
networks: books versus conference and journal articles, different areas of
computer science, and different time periods.
