Quantifying a Paper’s Academic Impact by Distinguishing the Unequal Intensities and Contributions of Citations

Abstract

Citation count is a widely-used indicator for calculating the academic impact of scientific papers, but it is limited because it assumes all citations are of similar value and weights each equally. By examining the influence changes in papers' citation distribution and the cited papers' unequal contributions to the citing ones, this study aims to distinguish citations and, on this basis, evaluate the academic impact of the papers. Three indices of time-weighted citation count, citation width and citation depth are proposed to distinguish citations and perform the evaluation task. The experimental results show that papers exhibit different influence intensity characteristics in different periods of citation life. Those papers got larger citations in recent years are more influential and more active to gain new citations. The papers show the different scope of influence in their citing environment, although they were originally published in the same journal and the same year. In addition, the different frequency of mentions and the different subject similarities with the citing works suggest that the papers have different importance and usefulness for subsequent research. These results suggest that these three indices do help to distinguish citations and reveal the different intensity and contribution of influences in citations. Finally, the three indices are integrated into the overall evaluation of the academic impact of the paper, and the weight of each index is calculated by the entropy weight method. Quite different overall impacts in the paper are shown due to their different performances in the three indices, even though they have the same total number of citations. INDEX TERMS Academic impact, time window, knowledge flow, mentioned frequency, entropy weight method.

Evaluating the impact of citations of articles based on knowledge flow patterns hidden in the citations

“…Every article should be seen as a carrier of knowledge, and every citation activity between articles contains the diffusion process of knowledge from the cited article to the citing one. In the earlier work done by the authors to detect the typical features influencing the citation impact of an article, we found that a wider citation distribution in various subjects, journals, countries, and institutions had a greater influence on increasing the citation impact of articles [41, 44–45]. Thus, this work constructed the feature space F from the aforementioned four features to describe the knowledge diffusion process among articles: …”

“…While the aforementioned researches seem to suggest that citations may exhibit different levels of importance, they do not explicitly reveal what these levels are and how to detect and use these different levels to evaluate the impact of an article. In one of our previous work, we made a preliminary discussion on the detection of various hidden patterns in citations [41]. The indices of citation intensity, citation width, and citation depth were proposed to distinguish unequal intensities and contributions in citations [41].…”

“…In one of our previous work, we made a preliminary discussion on the detection of various hidden patterns in citations [41]. The indices of citation intensity, citation width, and citation depth were proposed to distinguish unequal intensities and contributions in citations [41]. In fact, the occurrence of a citation will be accompanied by knowledge flow.…”

Research on the Relevancy of Scientific Literature Based on the Citation-Mention Frequency

“…At the same time, we calculated the effect size for t-test, effect-size (RS) = 0.2674, effect-size (CS) = 0.3514. (5) We calculated the test statistic T RS , T CS .…”

Quantifying Success in Science: An Overview

“…One possible solution is to construct a multi-dimensional metric in which the importance of citation, social relationships of authors, the relationship between the impact of early citers and scholarly paper impact, and citation inflation need to be explored. [37] prestige of a paper, prestige of author, time yes yes no yes using the citation network, the authorship network and the publication time of the article for predicting future citations [38] the time-weighted citation count, the citation width, the citation depth yes no no yes using entropy weight the three indices statistical feature, network feature, explicit feature, implicit feature, and evaluating paper impact. The number of citations has been used as a metric to evaluate paper impact for a long time [31].…”