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Identifying Anomalous Citations for Objective Evaluation of Scholarly Article Impact

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  • Xiaomei Bai
  • Feng Xia
  • Ivan Lee
  • Jun Zhang
  • Zhaolong Ning

Abstract

Evaluating the impact of a scholarly article is of great significance and has attracted great attentions. Although citation-based evaluation approaches have been widely used, these approaches face limitations e.g. in identifying anomalous citations patterns. This negligence would inevitably cause unfairness and inaccuracy to the article impact evaluation. In this study, in order to discover the anomalous citations and ensure the fairness and accuracy of research outcome evaluation, we investigate the citation relationships between articles using the following factors: collaboration times, the time span of collaboration, citing times and the time span of citing to weaken the relationship of Conflict of Interest (COI) in the citation network. Meanwhile, we study a special kind of COI, namely suspected COI relationship. Based on the COI relationship, we further bring forward the COIRank algorithm, an innovative scheme for accurately assessing the impact of an article. Our method distinguishes the citation strength, and utilizes PageRank and HITS algorithms to rank scholarly articles comprehensively. The experiments are conducted on the American Physical Society (APS) dataset. We find that about 80.88% articles contain contributed citations by co-authors in 26,366 articles and 75.55% articles among these articles are cited by the authors belonging to the same affiliation, indicating COI and suspected COI should not be ignored for evaluating impact of scientific papers objectively. Moreover, our experimental results demonstrate COIRank algorithm significantly outperforms the state-of-art solutions. The validity of our approach is verified by using the probability of Recommendation Intensity.

Suggested Citation

  • Xiaomei Bai & Feng Xia & Ivan Lee & Jun Zhang & Zhaolong Ning, 2016. "Identifying Anomalous Citations for Objective Evaluation of Scholarly Article Impact," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(9), pages 1-15, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0162364
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0162364
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Leo Egghe, 2006. "Theory and practise of the g-index," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 69(1), pages 131-152, October.
    2. Xiaojun Wan & Fang Liu, 2014. "Are all literature citations equally important? Automatic citation strength estimation and its applications," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 65(9), pages 1929-1938, September.
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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Akella, Akhil Pandey & Alhoori, Hamed & Kondamudi, Pavan Ravikanth & Freeman, Cole & Zhou, Haiming, 2021. "Early indicators of scientific impact: Predicting citations with altmetrics," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(2).
    2. Adilson Vital & Diego R. Amancio, 2022. "A comparative analysis of local similarity metrics and machine learning approaches: application to link prediction in author citation networks," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(10), pages 6011-6028, October.
    3. Fang Zhang & Shengli Wu, 2021. "Measuring academic entities’ impact by content-based citation analysis in a heterogeneous academic network," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(8), pages 7197-7222, August.
    4. Bai, Xiaomei & Zhang, Fuli & Lee, Ivan, 2019. "Predicting the citations of scholarly paper," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 407-418.
    5. Jun Zhang & Zhaolong Ning & Xiaomei Bai & Xiangjie Kong & Jinmeng Zhou & Feng Xia, 2017. "Exploring time factors in measuring the scientific impact of scholars," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 112(3), pages 1301-1321, September.
    6. Jun Zhang & Yan Hu & Zhaolong Ning & Amr Tolba & Elsayed Elashkar & Feng Xia, 2018. "AIRank: Author Impact Ranking through Positions in Collaboration Networks," Complexity, Hindawi, vol. 2018, pages 1-16, June.
    7. Siluo Yang & Xin Xing & Dietmar Wolfram, 2018. "Difference in the impact of open-access papers published by China and the USA," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(2), pages 1017-1037, May.
    8. Yuanyuan Liu & Qiang Wu & Shijie Wu & Yong Gao, 2021. "Weighted citation based on ranking-related contribution: a new index for evaluating article impact," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(10), pages 8653-8672, October.
    9. Rongying Zhao & Xu Wang, 2019. "Evaluation and comparison of influence in international Open Access journals between China and USA," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(3), pages 1091-1110, September.
    10. Wei Wang & Xiaomei Bai & Feng Xia & Teshome Megersa Bekele & Xiaoyan Su & Amr Tolba, 2017. "From triadic closure to conference closure: the role of academic conferences in promoting scientific collaborations," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(1), pages 177-193, October.

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