Measuring academic influence using heterogeneous author-citation networks

Fen Zhao (), Yi Zhang (), Jianguo Lu () and Ofer Shai ()
Additional contact information
Fen Zhao: University of Windsor
Yi Zhang: University of Windsor
Jianguo Lu: University of Windsor
Ofer Shai: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Inc.

Scientometrics, 2019, vol. 118, issue 3, No 20, 1119-1140

Abstract: Abstract Academic influence has been traditionally measured by citation counts and metrics derived from it, such as H-index and G-index. PageRank based algorithms have been used to give higher weight to citations from more influential papers. A better metric is to add authors into the citation network so that the importance of authors and papers are evaluated recursively within the same framework. Based on such heterogeneous author-citation academic network, this paper gives a new algorithm for ranking authors. It is tested on two large networks, one in Heath domain that contains about 500 million citation links, the other in Computer Science that contains 8 million links. We find that our method outperforms other 10 methods in terms of the number of award winners identified in their top-k rankings. Surprisingly, our method can identify 8 Turing award winners among top 20 authors. It also demonstrates some interesting phenomenons. For instance, among the top authors, our ranking negatively correlates with citation ranking and paper count ranking.

Keywords: Heterogeneous network; Author ranking; PageRank; Scholarly data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11192-019-03010-5

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