FutureCite: Predicting Research Articles’ Impact Using Machine Learning and Text and Graph Mining Techniques

Abstract

The growth in academic and scientific publications has increased very rapidly. Researchers must choose a representative and significant literature for their research, which has become challenging worldwide. Usually, the paper citation number indicates this paper’s potential influence and importance. However, this standard metric of citation numbers is not suitable to assess the popularity and significance of recently published papers. To address this challenge, this study presents an effective prediction method called FutureCite to predict the future citation level of research articles. FutureCite integrates machine learning with text and graph mining techniques, leveraging their abilities in classification, datasets in-depth analysis, and feature extraction. FutureCite aims to predict future citation levels of research articles applying a multilabel classification approach. FutureCite can extract significant semantic features and capture the interconnection relationships found in scientific articles during feature extraction using textual content, citation networks, and metadata as feature resources. This study’s objective is to contribute to the advancement of effective approaches impacting the citation counts in scientific publications by enhancing the precision of future citations. We conducted several experiments using a comprehensive publication dataset to evaluate our method and determine the impact of using a variety of machine learning algorithms. FutureCite demonstrated its robustness and efficiency and showed promising results based on different evaluation metrics. Using the FutureCite model has significant implications for improving the researchers’ ability to determine targeted literature for their research and better understand the potential impact of research publications.