Author Impact: Evaluations, Predictions, and Challenges

TL;DR

This paper reviews methods and challenges in evaluating and predicting author impact, covering data processing, modeling, and key issues like impact inflation and hot streaks, to guide future research in academic influence assessment.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of recent developments in author impact evaluation and prediction, highlighting research challenges and future directions.

Findings

Analysis of data collection and processing techniques

Evaluation of predictive models and metrics

Identification of key research issues in author impact

Abstract

Author impact evaluation and prediction play a key role in determining rewards, funding, and promotion. In this paper, we first introduce the background of author impact evaluation and prediction. Then, we review recent developments of author impact evaluation, including data collection, data pre-processing, data analysis, feature selection, algorithm design, and algorithm evaluation. Thirdly, we provide an in-depth literature review on author impact predictive models and common evaluation metrics. Finally, we look into the representative research issues, including author impact inflation, unified evaluation standards, academic success gene, identification of the origins of hot streaks, and higher-order academic networks analysis. This paper should help the researchers obtain a broader understanding in author impact evaluation and prediction, and provides future research directions.