API: An Index for Quantifying a Scholar's Academic Potential

Abstract

In the context of big scholarly data, various metrics and indicators have been widely applied to evaluate the impact of scholars from different perspectives, such as publication counts, citations, ${h}$-index, and their variants. However, these indicators have limited capacity in characterizing prospective impacts or achievements of scholars. To solve this problem, we propose the Academic Potential Index (API) to quantify scholar's academic potential. Furthermore, an algorithm is devised to calculate the value of API. It should be noted that API is a dynamic index throughout scholar's academic career. By applying API to rank scholars, we can identify scholars who show their academic potentials during the early academic careers. With extensive experiments conducted based on the Microsoft Academic Graph dataset, it can be found that the proposed index evaluates scholars' academic potentials effectively and captures the variation tendency of their academic impacts. Besides, we also apply this index to identify rising stars in academia. Experimental results show that the proposed API can achieve superior performance in identifying potential scholars compared with three baseline methods.