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.