The process of ranking scientific publications in dynamic citation networks plays a crucial rule in a variety of applications. Despite the availability of a number of ranking algorithms, most of them use common popularity metrics such as the citation count, h-index, and Impact Factor (IF). These adopted metrics cause a problem of bias in favor of older publications that took enough time to collect as many citations as possible. This paper focuses on solving the problem of bias by proposing a new ranking algorithm based on the PageRank (PR) algorithm; it is one of the main page ranking algorithms being widely used. The developed algorithm considers a newly suggested metric called the Citation Average rate of Change (CAC). Time information such as publication date and the citation occurrence’s time are used along with citation data to calculate the new metric. The proposed ranking algorithm was tested on a dataset of scientific papers in the field of medical physics published in the Dimensions database from years 2005 to 2017. The experimental results have shown that the proposed ranking algorithm outperforms the PageRank algorithm in ranking scientific publications where 26 papers instead of only 14 were ranked among the top 100 papers of this dataset. In addition, there were no radical changes or unreasonable jump in the ranking process, i.e., the correlation rate between the results of the proposed ranking method and the original PageRank algorithm was 92% based on the Spearman correlation coefficient.
References
[1]
Joshi, M.A. (2014) Bibliometric Indicators for Evaluating the Quality of Scientific Publications. The Journal of Contemporary Dental Practice, 15, 258-262. https://doi.org/10.5005/jp-journals-10024-1525
[2]
Page, L., Brin, S., Motwani, R. and Winograd, T. (1998) The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web. Stanford InfoLab, California.
Kanellos, I., Vergoulis, T., Sacharidis, D., Dalamagas, T. and Vassiliou, Y. (2019) Impact-Based Ranking of Scientific Publications: A Survey and Experimental Evaluation. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 33, 1567-1584. https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2019.2941206
[5]
Liu, X., Bollen, J., Nelson, M.L. and Van de Sompel, H. (2005) Co-Authorship Networks in the Digital Library Research Community. Information Processing & Management, 41, 1462-1480. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2005.03.012
[6]
Bollen, J., Rodriquez, M.A. and Van de Sompel, H. (2006) Journal Status. Scientometrics, 69, 669-687. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-006-0176-z
[7]
Chen, P., Xie, H., Maslov, S. and Redner, S. (2007) Finding Scientific Gems with Google’s PageRank Algorithm. Journal of Informetrics, 1, 8-15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2006.06.001
[8]
Yao, L., Wei, T., Zeng, A., Fan, Y. and Di, Z. (2014) Ranking Scientific Publications: The Effect of Nonlinearity. Scientific Reports, 4, Article No. 6663. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep06663
[9]
Yan, E. and Ding, Y. (2010) Weighted Citation: An Indicator of an Article’s Prestige. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 61, 1635-1643. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21349
[10]
Zhang, F. and Wu, S. (2018) Ranking Scientific Papers and Venues in Heterogeneous Academic Networks by Mutual Reinforcement. Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE on Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Fort Worth, 3-7 June 2018, 127-130. https://doi.org/10.1145/3197026.3197070
[11]
Ghosh, R., Kuo, T.-T., Hsu, C.-N., Lin, S.-D. and Lerman, K. (2011) Time-Aware Ranking in Dynamic Citation Networks. 2011 IEEE 11th International Conference on Data Mining Workshops, Vancouver, 11 December 2011, 373-380. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDMW.2011.183
[12]
Dunaiski, M. and Visser, W. (2012) Comparing Paper Ranking Algorithms. Proceedings of the South African Institute for Computer Scientists and Information Technologists Conference, Pretoria, 1-3 October 2012, 21-30. https://doi.org/10.1145/2389836.2389840
[13]
Giuffrida, C., Abramo, G. and D’Angelo, C.A. (2019) Are All Citations Worth the Same? Valuing Citations by the Value of the Citing Items. Journal of Informetrics, 13, 500-514. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2019.02.008
[14]
Hsu, C.-C., Chan, K.-H., Feng, M.-H., Wu, Y.-H., Chen, H.-Y., Yu, S.-H., et al. (2016) Time-Aware Weighted Page Rank for Paper Ranking in Academic Graphs. Proceedings of the 9th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, WSDM’16, San Francisco, 22-25 February 2016, 1-4.
[15]
Ma, S., Gong, C., Hu, R., Luo, D., Hu, C. and Huai, J. (2018) Query Independent Scholarly Article Ranking. 2018 IEEE 34th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Paris, 16-19 April 2018, 953-964. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDE.2018.00090
[16]
Wei, Y., Yi, F., Cui, X. and Chen, F. (2021) An Improved Page Rank Algorithm Based on Text Similarity Approach for Critical Standards Identification in Complex Standard Citation Networks. Complexity, 2021, Article ID: 8825947. https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/8825947
[17]
Walker, D., Xie, H., Yan, K.-K. and Maslov, S. (2007) Ranking Scientific Publications Using a Model of Network Traffic. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 2007, Article ID: P06010. https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-5468/2007/06/P06010
[18]
Sayyadi, H. and Getoor, L. (2009) Futurerank: Ranking Scientific Articles by Predicting Their Future Page Rank. Proceedings of the 2009 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, Sparks, 30 April-2 May 2009, 533-544. https://doi.org/10.1137/1.9781611972795.46
[19]
Kanellos, I., Vergoulis, T., Sacharidis, D., Dalamagas, T. and Vassiliou, Y. (2021) Ranking Papers by Their Short-Term Scientific Impact. 2021 IEEE 37th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Chania, 19-22 April 2021, 1997-2002. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDE51399.2021.00190
[20]
Hirsch, J.E. (2005) An Index to Quantify an Individual’s Scientific Research Output. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102, 16569-16572. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0507655102
[21]
Garfield, E. (2006) The History and Meaning of the Journal Impact Factor. The Journal of the American Medical Association, 295, 90-93. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.295.1.90
[22]
Hwang, W.-S., Chae, S.-M., Kim, S.-W. and Woo, G. (2010) Yet Another Paper Ranking Algorithm Advocating Recent Publications. Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web, Raleigh, 26-30 April 2010, 1117-1118. https://doi.org/10.1145/1772690.1772832
[23]
Kleinberg, J.M. (1999) Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment. Journal of ACM, 46, 604-632. https://doi.org/10.1145/324133.324140
[24]
Du, M., Bai, F. and Liu, Y. (2009) PaperRank: A Ranking Model for Scientific Publication. 2009 WRI World Congress on Computer Science and Information Engineering, Los Angeles, 31 March-2 April 2009, 277-281. https://doi.org/10.1109/CSIE.2009.479
[25]
Wang, Y., Tong, Y. and Zeng. M. (2013) Ranking Scientific Articles by Exploiting Citations, Authors, Journals, and Time Information. Proceedings of the 27th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Bellevue, 14-18 July 2013, 933-939.
[26]
Lu, Y., Ma, K. and Duan, J. (2021) Influence Model of Paper Citation Networks with Integrated PageRank and HITS. 2021 IEEE 24th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD), Dalian, 5-7 May 2021, 1081-1086. https://doi.org/10.1109/CSCWD49262.2021.9437678
[27]
Nie, Z., Zhang, Y., Wen, J.-R. and Ma, W.-Y. (2005) Object-Level Ranking: Bringing Order to Web Objects. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on World Wide Web, Chiba, 10-14 May 2005, 567-574. https://doi.org/10.1145/1060745.1060828
[28]
Bai, X., Zhang, F., Ni, J., Shi, L. and Lee, I. (2020) Measure the Impact of Institution and Paper via Institution-Citation Network. IEEE Access, 8, 17548-17555. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2968459
[29]
Adams, R.A. and Essex, C. (1995) Calculus: A Complete Cours. 3rd Edition, Addison-Wesley, Boston.
[30]
Digital Science (2018) Dimensions [Software]. https://app.dimensions.ai
[31]
Bastian, M., Heymann, S. and Jacomy, M. (2009) Gephi: An Open Source Software for Exploring and Manipulating Networks. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Vol. 3, San Jose, 17-20 May 2009, 361-362.
[32]
Myers, J.L., Well, A.D. and Lorch, R.F.J. (2013) Research Design and Statistical Analysis. Routledge, New York. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203726631
