Impact of a Big Science discovery, according to two scientific communication models: the case of top quark

Abstract

We present a bibliometric analysis of the impact measured in terms of publications and citations associated to the discovery of the elementary particle top quark, which was reached in an environment of Big Science experiments performed by the multi-institutional collaboration DO (Detector 0). We consider the period from 1994 to 2002, which corresponds to the participation of Mexican researchers in this Big Science discipline. The methodology used includes the identification and compilation of papers and existing citations of two information systems: SPIRES and SCI. The former is a representative of the informal model of scientific communication and the latter of the formal one. The resulting patterns of publication and citation of both models of communication were compared; our results identify a process of double publication-citation: one based on the versions of e-prints of the documents and an other one on the final versions of the papers published in scientific journals.