S-index: Significance of Academic Authors to Individual Publication Venues

Many author-level metrics have been proposed and employed to evaluate the publication performance of academic authors, such as citation count, h-index and other citation-based indices. These metrics are global measures which evaluate the authors' productivity and impact based on all of their publications without differentiating the publication venues. However, from the perspective of an individual publication venue (journal or conference), it is also important to have a localised approach which can specifically indicate the significance of an author to the particular venue. Identifying these significant authors is valuable for the venues to hire appropriate journal editors, conference chairs and committee members. In this paper, we propose a venue-aware author evaluation metric, S-index, to measure the significance of authors to individual publication venues based on the term frequency - inverse document frequency (TF-IDF). This new metric reveals the differentiated values of the same author in different venues. To verify the effectiveness of S-index in identifying significant authors for venues, we carry out extensive experiments on three datasets of different research fields, and compare the S-index to five classic comparison metrics, including a localised version of h-index. Results demonstrate that the scoring behaviour of S-index is different from that of the other metrics, and it is more effective in identifying significant authors for publication venues.