Is the Article Crucial to My Research? Evaluating Task-Oriented Impacts of Scientific Articles in Information Seeking

Abstract

We propose a new aspect of evaluating scientific articles: crucialness, which refers to the state of articles being not only useful, but also scarce (difficult to be found or identified by scientists). Compared with the popularity-based metrics, crucialness may be a better metric in helping scientists’ information seeking and use because it identifies scientists’ difficulties in information seeking and reveals the crucial articles that may help scientists succeed in research. Some preliminary results are presented and discussed.