Author ranking evaluation at scale

Abstract

Abstract We evaluate author impact indicators and ranking algorithms on two publication databases using large test data sets of well-established researchers. The test data consists of (1) ACM fellowship and (2) various life-time achievement awards. We also evaluate different approaches of dividing credit of papers among co-authors and analyse the impact of self-citations. Furthermore, we evaluate different graph normalisation approaches for when PageRank is computed on author citation graphs. We find that PageRank outperforms citation counts in identifying well-established researchers. This holds true when PageRank is computed on author citation graphs but also when PageRank is computed on paper graphs and paper scores are divided among co-authors. In general, the best results are obtained when co-authors receive an equal share of a paper's score, independent of which impact indicator is used to compute paper scores. The results also show that removing author self-citations improves the results of most ranking metrics. Lastly, we find that it is more important to personalise the PageRank algorithm appropriately on the paper level than deciding whether to include or exclude self-citations. However, on the author level, we find that author graph normalisation is more important than personalisation.