Data from: Measuring researchers’ potential scholarly impact with structural variations: four types of researchers in information science (1979–2018)

We propose a method to measure the potential scholarly impact of
researchers based on network structural variations they introduced to the
underlying author co-citation network of their field. We applied the
method to the information science field based on 91,978 papers published
between 1979 and 2018 from the Web of Science. We divided the entire
period into eight consecutive intervals and measured structural variation
change rates (DM) of individual authors in corresponding author
co-citation networks. Four types of researchers are identified in terms of
temporal dynamics of their potential scholarly impact—1) Increasing, 2)
Decreasing, 3) Sustained, and 4) Transient. The study contributes to the
understanding of how researchers’ scholarly impact might evolve in a broad
context of the corresponding research community. Specifically, this study
illustrated a crucial role played by structural variation metrics in
measuring and explaining the potential scholarly impact of a researcher.
This method based on the structural variation analysis offers a
theoretical framework and a practical platform to analyze the potential
scholarly impact of researchers and their specific contributions.