Abstract
Citation count is a widely-used indicator for calculating the academic impact of scientific papers, but it is limited because it assumes all citations are of similar value and weights each equally. By examining the influence changes in papers’ citation distribution and the cited papers’ unequal contributions to the citing ones, this study aims to distinguish citations and, on this basis, evaluate the academic impact of the papers. Three indices of time-weighted citation count, citation width and citation depth are proposed to distinguish citations and perform the evaluation task. The experimental results show that papers exhibit different influence intensity characteristics in different periods of citation life. Those papers got larger citations in recent years are more influential and more active to gain new citations. The papers show the different scope of influence in their citing environment, although they were originally published in the same journal and the same year. In addition, the different frequency of mentions and the different subject similarities with the citing works suggest that the papers have different importance and usefulness for subsequent research. These results suggest that these three indices do help to distinguish citations and reveal the different intensity and contribution of influences in citations. Finally, the three indices are integrated into the overall evaluation of the academic impact of the paper, and the weight of each index is calculated by the entropy weight method. Quite different overall impacts in the paper are shown due to their different performances in the three indices, even though they have the same total number of citations.
Highlights
The academic research and policy agenda increasingly seeks to measure and use ‘‘impact’’ as a means of determining the value of different items of published research [1], [2]
Based on the above discussion, this paper proposed three indices of: 1) the time-weighted citation count, 2) the citation width, and 3) the citation depth, to distinguish the unequal intensities and contributions in citations
We examined the correlation between a paper’s past citations and its future citations, with the aim of investigating the evolving influence intensities in different time periods
Summary
The academic research and policy agenda increasingly seeks to measure and use ‘‘impact’’ as a means of determining the value of different items of published research [1], [2]. Inspired by the success of Google’s ranking system for web pages, the popular algorithm PageRank as well as some of its variants have been used to show the prestige in citation networks of journals [23], [24], scientists [25]–[27], and publications [28]–[42]. The local and global structure of citation graph [27], [35], [37], [41], [42], the heterogeneity of the citation networks [32], the ‘‘virtual node’’ which considers the citations not included in the current systems [33], and the age of the publications [28], [31], [35] are taken into account in these researches
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