Topic-based Pagerank: toward a topic-level scientific evaluation

Within the same research field, different subfields and topics may exhibit varied citation behaviors and scholarly communication patterns. For a more effect scientific evaluation at the topic level, this study proposes a topic-based PageRank approach. This approach aims to evaluate the scientific impact of research entities (e.g., papers, authors, journals, and institutions) at the topic-level. The proposed topic-based PageRank, when applied to a data set on library and information science publications, has effectively detected a variety of research topics and identified authors, papers, and journals of the highest impact from each topic. Evaluation results show that compared with the standard PageRank and a topic modeling technique, the proposed topic-based PageRank has the best performance on relevance and impact. Different perspectives of organizing scientific literature are also discussed and this study recommends the mode of organization that integrates stable research domains and dynamic topics.