Successful fish go with the flow: citation impact prediction based on centrality measures for term–document networks

Peter Klimek (), Aleksandar Jovanovic (), Rainer Egloff and Reto Schneider
Additional contact information
Aleksandar Jovanovic: Steinbeis Advanced Risk Technologies
Rainer Egloff: Swiss Reinsurance Company Ltd
Reto Schneider: Swiss Reinsurance Company Ltd

Scientometrics, 2016, vol. 107, issue 3, No 17, 1265-1282

Abstract: Abstract In this work we address the challenge of how to identify those documents from a given set of texts that are most likely to have substantial impact in the future. To this end we develop a purely content-based methodology in order to rank a given set of documents, for example abstracts of scientific publications, according to their potential to generate impact as measured by the numbers of citations that the articles will receive in the future. We construct a bipartite network consisting of documents that are linked to keywords and terms that they contain. We study recursive centrality measures for such networks that quantify how many different terms a document contains and how these terms are related to each other. From this we derive a novel indicator—document centrality—that is shown to be highly predictive of citation impact in six different case studies. We compare these results to findings from a multivariable regression model and from conventional network-based centrality measures to show that document centrality indeed offers a comparably high performance in identifying those articles that contain a large number of high-impact keywords. Our findings suggest that articles which conform to the mainstream within a given research field tend to receive higher numbers of citations than highly original and innovative articles.

Keywords: Citation impact prediction; Term–document matrix; Network theory; Bipartite networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11192-016-1926-1

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