Estimating number of citations using author reputation

Abstract:

We study the problem of predicting the popularity of items in a dynamic environment in which authors post continuously new items and provide feedback on existing items. This problem can be applied to predict popularity of blog posts, rank photographs in a photo-sharing system, or predict the citations of a scientific article using author information and monitoring the items of interest for a short period of time after their creation. As a case study, we show how to estimate the number of citations for an academic paper using information about past articles written by the same author(s) of the paper. If we use only the citation information over a short period of time, we obtain a predicted value that has a correlation of r=0.57 with the actual value. This is our baseline prediction. Our best-performing system can improve that prediction by adding features extracted from the past publishing history of its authors, increasing the correlation between the actual and the predicted values to r=0.81.