Measuring scientific prestige of papers with time-aware mutual reinforcement ranking model.

Quantitative methods for determining the quality of scientific publications evolved gradually from popularity methods to prestige methods. However, existing methods have some drawbacks, such as inability to account for important factors and mutual reinforcement between different entities, and limitation of using novel information techniques like artificial intelligence (AI) methods. This study proposes an intelligent time-aware mutual reinforcement ranking (TAMRR) model that accounts for mutual reinforcement, and temporal factors, such as the time of citation, to measure the prestige of scientific papers. The method also considers the distribution of the co-authors' contributions, which indicates the credit allocation of citations. Moreover, mutual reinforcement which indicates interactive impact between different entities by means of the extension of an AI algorithm, i.e., Hyperlink-Induced Topics Search (HITS) algorithm, is adopted to further explore the interactions of papers, journals and authors. Another AI algorithm, i.e., PageRank, is also enhanced to measure the prestige of papers, journals, and authors in citation networks, which are then used as the inputs to the modified HITS. Experiments on temporal factors and heterogeneous networks reveal that these factors are likely to be informative in prestige measurements. Analysis of correlations suggests that our proposed intelligent ranking method is reasonable. This study offers an intelligent method for researchers, authors, and entrepreneurs to quantify the importance of scientific papers and the conclusions are likely to be of importance for researchers in both the academic and enterprise domains.