An Overview on Evaluating and Predicting Scholarly Article Impact

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in evaluating and predicting scholarly article impact, discussing key methods, applications, challenges, and future research directions in the field.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of current techniques and highlights new research directions in scholarly article impact assessment and prediction.

Findings

Integration of multiple networks improves impact prediction accuracy

Machine learning and data mining are key techniques in impact analysis

Open issues include considering conflict of interest, temporal, and spatial factors

Abstract

Scholarly article impact reflects the significance of academic output recognised by academic peers, and it often plays a crucial role in assessing the scientific achievements of researchers, teams, institutions and countries. It is also used for addressing various needs in the academic and scientific arena, such as recruitment decisions, promotions, and funding allocations. This article provides a comprehensive review of recent progresses related to article impact assessment and prediction. The~review starts by sharing some insight into the article impact research and outlines current research status. Some core methods and recent progress are presented to outline how article impact metrics and prediction have evolved to consider integrating multiple networks. Key techniques, including statistical analysis, machine learning, data mining and network science, are discussed. In particular, we highlight important applications of each technique in article impact research. Subsequently, we discuss the open issues and challenges of article impact research. At the same time, this review points out some important research directions, including article impact evaluation by considering Conflict of Interest, time and location information, various distributions of scholarly entities, and rising stars.