Ranking Papers by their Short-Term Scientific Impact
This work addresses the challenge for researchers in quickly finding impactful papers in their field, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing citation network models.
The paper tackles the problem of identifying high-impact scientific papers by ranking them based on short-term citation counts, using an attention-based mechanism to model researcher preferences, and shows improved effectiveness over previous methods in experiments across four real datasets.
The constantly increasing rate at which scientific papers are published makes it difficult for researchers to identify papers that currently impact the research field of their interest. Hence, approaches to effectively identify papers of high impact have attracted great attention in the past. In this work, we present a method that seeks to rank papers based on their estimated short-term impact, as measured by the number of citations received in the near future. Similar to previous work, our method models a researcher as she explores the paper citation network. The key aspect is that we incorporate an attention-based mechanism, akin to a time-restricted version of preferential attachment, to explicitly capture a researcher's preference to read papers which received a lot of attention recently. A detailed experimental evaluation on four real citation datasets across disciplines, shows that our approach is more effective than previous work in ranking papers based on their short-term impact.