Quantifying the Impact of Scholarly Papers Based on Higher-Order Weighted Citations

TL;DR

This paper investigates how geographical distance affects citation impact and introduces a higher-order weighted quantum PageRank algorithm to better quantify scholarly influence, capturing complex citation dynamics and self-citations.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach combining higher-order weighted citations and quantum PageRank to more accurately assess paper impact considering geographical and citation flow complexities.

Findings

Geographical distance influences citation impact.

Higher-order weighted quantum PageRank improves impact assessment.

Self-citations are integral to understanding true paper influence.

Abstract

Quantifying the impact of a scholarly paper is of great significance, yet the effect of geographical distance of cited papers has not been explored. In this paper, we examine 30,596 papers published in Physical Review C, and identify the relationship between citations and geographical distances between author affiliations. Subsequently, a relative citation weight is applied to assess the impact of a scholarly paper. A higher-order weighted quantum PageRank algorithm is also developed to address the behavior of multiple step citation flow. Capturing the citation dynamics with higher-order dependencies reveals the actual impact of papers, including necessary self-citations that are sometimes excluded in prior studies. Quantum PageRank is utilized in this paper to help differentiating nodes whose PageRank values are identical.