Utilizing citation network structure to predict paper citation counts: A Deep learning approach

With the advancement of science and technology, the number of academic papers published each year has increased almost exponentially. While a large number of research papers highlight the prosperity of science and technology, they also give rise to some problems. As we know, academic papers are the most intuitive embodiment of the research results of scholars, which can reflect the level of researchers. It is also the standard for evaluation and decision-making of them, such as promotion and allocation of funds. Therefore, how to measure the quality of an academic paper is very critical. The most common standard for measuring the quality of academic papers is the number of citation counts of them, as this indicator is widely used in the evaluation of scientific publications. It also serves as the basis for many other indicators (such as the h-index). Therefore, it is very important to be able to accurately predict the citation counts of academic papers. To improve the effective of citation counts prediction, we try to solve the citation counts prediction problem from the perspective of information cascade prediction and take advantage of deep learning techniques. Thus, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework (DeepCCP), consisting of graph structure representation and recurrent neural network modules. DeepCCP directly uses the citation network formed in the early stage of the paper as the input, and outputs the citation counts of the corresponding paper after a period of time. It only exploits the structure and temporal information of the citation network, and does not require other additional information. According to experiments on two real academic citation datasets, DeepCCP is shown superior to the state-of-the-art methods in terms of the accuracy of citation count prediction.