Ranking scientific articles based on bibliometric networks with a weighting scheme

As the volume of scientific articles has grown rapidly over the last decades, evaluating their impact becomes critical for tracing valuable and significant research output. Many studies have proposed various ranking methods to estimate the prestige of academic papers using bibliometric methods. However, the weight of the links in bibliometric networks has been rarely considered for article ranking in existing literature. Such incomplete investigation in bibliometric methods could lead to biased ranking results. Therefore, a novel scientific article ranking algorithm, W-Rank, is introduced in this study proposing a weighting scheme. The scheme assigns weight to the links of citation network and authorship network by measuring citation relevance and author contribution. Combining the weighted bibliometric networks and a propagation algorithm, W-Rank is able to obtain article ranking results that are more reasonable than existing PageRank-based methods. Experiments are conducted on both arXiv hep-th and Microsoft Academic Graph datasets to verify the W-Rank and compare it with three renowned article ranking algorithms. Experimental results prove that the proposed weighting scheme assists the W-Rank in obtaining ranking results of higher accuracy and, in certain perspectives, outperforming the other algorithms.