Predicting the citation counts of individual papers via a BP neural network

Predicting the citation counts of academic papers is of considerable significance to scientific evaluation. This study used a four-layer Back Propagation (BP) neural network model to predict the five-year citations of 49,834 papers in the library, information and documentation field indexed by the CSSCI database and published from 2000 to 2013. We extracted six paper features, two journal features, nine author features, eight reference features, and five early citation features to make the prediction. The empirical experiments showed that the performance of the BP neural network is significantly better than those of the six baseline models. In terms of the prediction effect, the accuracy of the model at predicting infrequently cited papers was higher than that for frequently cited ones. We determined that five essential features have significant effects on the prediction performance of the model, i.e., ‘citations in the first two years’, ‘first-cited age’, ‘paper length’, ‘month of publication’, and ‘self-citations of journals’, and the other features contribute only slightly to the prediction.     

How to consider fractional counting and field normalization in the statistical modeling of bibliometric data: A multilevel Poisson regression approach

The numerical-algorithmic procedures of fractional counting and field normalization are often mentioned as indispensable requirements for bibliometric analyses. Against the background of the increasing importance of statistics in bibliometrics, a multilevel Poisson regression model (level 1: publication, level 2: author) shows possible ways to consider fractional counting and field normalization in a statistical model (fractional counting I). However, due to the assumption of duplicate publications in the data set, the approach is not quite optimal. Therefore, a more advanced approach, a multilevel multiple membership model, is proposed that no longer provides for duplicates (fractional counting II). It is assumed that the citation impact can essentially be attributed to time-stable dispositions of researchers as authors who contribute with different fractions to the success of a publication’s citation. The two approaches are applied to bibliometric data for 254 scientists working in social science methodology. A major advantage of fractional counting II is that the results no longer depend on the type of fractional counting (e.g., equal weighting). Differences between authors in rankings are reproduced more clearly than on the basis of percentiles. In addition, the strong importance of field normalization is demonstrated; 60% of the citation variance is explained by field normalization.