LAUSR

The objective of this paper is to systematically assess sources' (e.g., journals and proceedings) impact in knowledge trading. While there have been efforts at evaluating different aspects of journal impact, the dimension of knowledge trading is largely absent. To fill the gap, this study employed a set of trading‐based indicators, including weighted degree centrality, Shannon entropy, and weighted betweenness centrality, to assess sources' trading impact. These indicators were applied to several time‐sliced source‐to‐source citation networks that comprise 33,634 sources indexed in the Scopus database. The results show that several interdisciplinary sources, such as Nature, PLoS One, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science, and several specialty sources, such as Lancet, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Journal of Biological Chemistry, and New England Journal of Medicine, have demonstrated their marked importance in knowledge trading. Furthermore, this study also reveals that, overall, sources have established more trading partners, increased their trading volumes, broadened their trading areas, and diversified their trading contents over the past 15 years from 1997 to 2011. These results inform the understanding of source‐level impact assessment and knowledge diffusion.