High impact academic paper prediction using temporal and topological features

Abstract

Predicting promising academic papers is useful for a variety of parties, including researchers, universities, scientific councils, and policymakers. Researchers may benefit from such data to narrow down their reading list and focus on what will be important, and policymakers may use predictions to infer rising fields for a more strategic distribution of resources. This paper proposes a novel technique to predict a paper's future impact (i.e., number of citations) by using temporal and topological features derived from citation networks. We use a behavioral modeling approach in which the temporal change in the number of citations a paper gets is clustered, and new papers are evaluated accordingly. Then, within each cluster, we model the impact prediction as a regression problem where the objective is to predict the number of citations that a paper will get in the near or far future, given the early citation performance of the paper. The results of empirical evaluations on data from several well-known citation databases show that the proposed framework performs significantly better than the state of the art approaches.