An approach to identify influential building blocks and linkages in an information resource network

An information resource network (IRN) is a time‐ordered and potentially interrelated set of information elements. Examples include papers within a research domain, blog postings dealing with a certain topic, and information records within a company. We present a structured analysis to identify influential building blocks and linkages in a general IRN and show that our approach can be used for large networks of information nodes. Our method compensates for biases that can emerge at the edges of such time‐dependent networks. Importantly, our focus is on the information elements and not on the authors of such information. We illustrate this process using one example of a resource network – research papers in a given domain. Our method can be implemented in any domain that can be represented as time‐ordered, interrelated components of information sets.