A Temporal Metric-Based Efficient Approach to Predict Citation Counts of Scientists

Citation count is one of the essential factors in understanding and measuring the impact of a scientist or a publication. Estimating the future impact of scientists or publications is crucial as it assists in making decisions about potential awardees of research grants, appointing researchers for several scientific positions, etc. Many studies have been proposed to estimate publication’s future citation count; however, limited research has been conducted on forecasting the citation-based influence of the scientists. The authors of the scientific manuscripts are connected through common publications, which can be captured in dynamic network structures with multiple features in the nodes and the links. The topological structure is an essential factor to consider as it reveals important information about such dynamic networks, such as the rise and fall in the network properties like in-degree, etc., over time for nodes. In this work, we have developed an approach for predicting the citation count of scientists using topological information from dynamic citation networks and relevant contents of individual publications. This framework of the citation count prediction is formulated as the node classification task, which is accomplished by using seven machine learning-based classification models for various class categories. The highest average accuracy of 85.19% is achieved with the XGBoost classifier on the High Energy Physics - Theory citation network dataset.