217 research outputs found
Understanding the Impact of Early Citers on Long-Term Scientific Impact
This paper explores an interesting new dimension to the challenging problem
of predicting long-term scientific impact (LTSI) usually measured by the number
of citations accumulated by a paper in the long-term. It is well known that
early citations (within 1-2 years after publication) acquired by a paper
positively affects its LTSI. However, there is no work that investigates if the
set of authors who bring in these early citations to a paper also affect its
LTSI. In this paper, we demonstrate for the first time, the impact of these
authors whom we call early citers (EC) on the LTSI of a paper. Note that this
study of the complex dynamics of EC introduces a brand new paradigm in citation
behavior analysis. Using a massive computer science bibliographic dataset we
identify two distinct categories of EC - we call those authors who have high
overall publication/citation count in the dataset as influential and the rest
of the authors as non-influential. We investigate three characteristic
properties of EC and present an extensive analysis of how each category
correlates with LTSI in terms of these properties. In contrast to popular
perception, we find that influential EC negatively affects LTSI possibly owing
to attention stealing. To motivate this, we present several representative
examples from the dataset. A closer inspection of the collaboration network
reveals that this stealing effect is more profound if an EC is nearer to the
authors of the paper being investigated. As an intuitive use case, we show that
incorporating EC properties in the state-of-the-art supervised citation
prediction models leads to high performance margins. At the closing, we present
an online portal to visualize EC statistics along with the prediction results
for a given query paper
Measuring academic influence: Not all citations are equal
The importance of a research article is routinely measured by counting how
many times it has been cited. However, treating all citations with equal weight
ignores the wide variety of functions that citations perform. We want to
automatically identify the subset of references in a bibliography that have a
central academic influence on the citing paper. For this purpose, we examine
the effectiveness of a variety of features for determining the academic
influence of a citation. By asking authors to identify the key references in
their own work, we created a data set in which citations were labeled according
to their academic influence. Using automatic feature selection with supervised
machine learning, we found a model for predicting academic influence that
achieves good performance on this data set using only four features. The best
features, among those we evaluated, were those based on the number of times a
reference is mentioned in the body of a citing paper. The performance of these
features inspired us to design an influence-primed h-index (the hip-index).
Unlike the conventional h-index, it weights citations by how many times a
reference is mentioned. According to our experiments, the hip-index is a better
indicator of researcher performance than the conventional h-index
Theories of Informetrics and Scholarly Communication
Scientometrics have become an essential element in the practice and evaluation of science and research, including both the evaluation of individuals and national assessment exercises. Yet, researchers and practitioners in this field have lacked clear theories to guide their work. As early as 1981, then doctoral student Blaise Cronin published "The need for a theory of citing" —a call to arms for the fledgling scientometric community to produce foundational theories upon which the work of the field could be based. More than three decades later, the time has come to reach out the field again and ask how they have responded to this call.
This book compiles the foundational theories that guide informetrics and scholarly communication research. It is a much needed compilation by leading scholars in the field that gathers together the theories that guide our understanding of authorship, citing, and impact
- …