Text-Mining Research Group

PageRank variants in the evaluation of citation networks

This paper explores a possible approach to a research evaluation, by calculating the renown of authors of scientific papers. The evaluation is based on the citation analysis and its results should be close to a human viewpoint. The PageRank algorithm and its modifications were used for the evaluation of various types of citation networks. Our main research question was whether better evaluation results were based directly on an author network or on a publication network. Other issues concerned, for example, the determination of weights in the author network and the distribution of publication scores among their authors. The citation networks were extracted from the computer science domain in the ISI Web of Science database. The influence of self-citations was also explored. To find the best network for a research evaluation, the outputs of PageRank were compared with lists of prestigious awards in computer science such as the Turing and Codd award, ISI Highly Cited and ACM Fellows. Our experiments proved that the best ranking of authors was obtained by using a publication citation network from which self-citations were eliminated, and by distributing the same proportional parts of the publications’ values to their authors. The ranking can be used as a criterion for the financial support of research teams, for identifying leaders of such teams, etc.
The available full text is a preprint of the article.

Keywords: PageRank; Citation analysis; Research evaluation; Author ranking; ISI Web of Science.

Year: 2014

Download:  Full text [790 kB]

Michal Nykl

E-mail: nyklm@kiv.zcu.cz
WWW: http://home.zcu.cz/~nyklm/

Michal is researcher at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen (Czech Republic). He is Software engineer and his interest is focused on the Graph structure mining algorithms, which are used for Social network analysis, Text-mining, NPL and similar problems.

Karel Ježek

Phone:  +420 377632475
E-mail: jezek_ka@kiv.zcu.cz
WWW: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_Je%C5%BEek_(informatik)

Karel is the former group coordinator and a supervisor of PhD students working at research projects of this Group.

Dalibor Fiala

Phone: +420 377 63 2429
E-mail: dalfia@kiv.zcu.cz
WWW: http://www.kiv.zcu.cz/~dalfia/

Dalibor is the research group coordinator and an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic. He is interested in data mining, web mining, information retrieval, informetrics, and information science.

Martin Dostal

E-mail: madostal@kiv.zcu.cz

Martin graduated from the University of West Bohemia in 2009, specialized in software engineering. He is interested in the semantic Web, information retrieval, and question answering.

Social Networks Analysis
Authors:	Karel Ježek, Dalibor Fiala, Michal Nykl
Desc.:	Application of the PageRank algorithm and its modifications to the exploration of network structures, particularly citation and co-autorship networks.