Citation Network Based Framework for Ranking Academic Publications and Venues

Abstract

Academic publication venues play an important role in the scholarly commu- nication process. The number of venues has been increasing yearly, making it di cult for researchers to get an idea about publication venues. Most of the existing methods use citation count as the metric to measure the reputation of publication venues which does not take into account the quality of citations. Therefore it is vital to have a publication venue quality estimation mechanism. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach for ranking academic publication venues by considering publication history. Our approach is completely based on the citation graph represented by the publications. A modi ed version of the PageRank algorithm is used to compute the ranking scores for each publication. This algorithm is not su cient for all the publications since recent publications only have a few citations. To address the weakness of this method, we propose an alternative metric which uses an author score derived from citations received for publications of the author. The publication scores of lower citation counts are adjusted by averaging the scores of all the authors of the publication. In our method, there are many aspects that contribute to the importance of a publication, including the citations it has received, the quality of the citing publications, the time metric and its authors. Previous publication venue scores have been formulated by using the ranking scores of the publications. New publication venue ranking is taken care by the scores of PC members/editorial board which derive from scores of authors. A comparative study is carried out to show the e ectiveness of our publication ranking method by comparing our results to the other methods. The exper- imental results indicated that our publication ranking method reduces the bias against the recent publications, which only have a few or zero citations. Finally, various interesting results about publication venues are discovered.