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Successful fish go with the flow: citation impact prediction based on centrality measures for term–document networks

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Abstract

In this work we address the challenge of how to identify those documents from a given set of texts that are most likely to have substantial impact in the future. To this end we develop a purely content-based methodology in order to rank a given set of documents, for example abstracts of scientific publications, according to their potential to generate impact as measured by the numbers of citations that the articles will receive in the future. We construct a bipartite network consisting of documents that are linked to keywords and terms that they contain. We study recursive centrality measures for such networks that quantify how many different terms a document contains and how these terms are related to each other. From this we derive a novel indicator—document centrality—that is shown to be highly predictive of citation impact in six different case studies. We compare these results to findings from a multivariable regression model and from conventional network-based centrality measures to show that document centrality indeed offers a comparably high performance in identifying those articles that contain a large number of high-impact keywords. Our findings suggest that articles which conform to the mainstream within a given research field tend to receive higher numbers of citations than highly original and innovative articles.

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Notes

  1. http://wikibon.org/blog/big-data-statistics/, retrieved 07/29/2015.

  2. http://apps.webofknowledge.com/.

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Acknowledgments

PK acknowledges financial support from the European Commission, EU FP7 Project MULTIPLEX, No. 317532. We thank the anonymous referees for providing extremely helpful comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Section for Science of Complex Systems, Medical University of Vienna, Spitalgasse 23, 1090, Vienna, Austria

    Peter Klimek

  2. Steinbeis Advanced Risk Technologies, Willi-Bleicher-Straße 19, 70174, Stuttgart, Germany

    Peter Klimek & Aleksandar S. Jovanovic

  3. EU-VRi, Willi-Bleicher-Straße 19, 70174, Stuttgart, Germany

    Aleksandar S. Jovanovic

  4. Swiss Reinsurance Company Ltd, Mythenquai 50/60, 8022, Zurich, Switzerland

    Rainer Egloff & Reto Schneider

Authors
  1. Peter Klimek
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  2. Aleksandar S. Jovanovic
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  3. Rainer Egloff
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  4. Reto Schneider
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Correspondence to Aleksandar S. Jovanovic.

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Klimek, P., S. Jovanovic, A., Egloff, R. et al. Successful fish go with the flow: citation impact prediction based on centrality measures for term–document networks. Scientometrics 107, 1265–1282 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1926-1

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