With the growing amount of published research, automatic evaluation of scholarly publications is becoming an important task. In this paper we address this problem and present a simple and transparent approach for evaluating the importance of scholarly publications. Our method has been ranked among the top performers in the WSDM Cup 2016 Challenge. The first part of this paper describes our method. In the second part we present potential improvements to the method and analyse the evaluation setup which was provided during the challenge. Finally, we discuss future challenges in automatic evaluation of papers including the use of full-texts based evaluation methods
