Scholarly impact assessment: a survey of citation weighting solutions

Scholarly impact assessment has always been a hot issue. It has played an important role in evaluating researchers, scientific papers, scientific teams, and institutions within science of science. Scholarly impact assessment is also used to address fundamental issues, such as reward evaluation, funding allocation, promotion and recruitment decision. Scholars generally agree that it is more reasonable to use weighted citations to assess the scholarly impact. Although a great number of researchers use weighted citations to access the scholarly impact, there is a lack of a systematic summary of citation weighting methods. To fill the gap, this paper summarizes the existing classical indicators and weighting methods used in measuring scholarly impact from the perspectives of articles, authors and journals. We also summarize the focus of the indicators involved in this paper and the weighting factors that involved in the weighting methods. Finally, we discuss the open issues to try to discover the hidden trends of citation weighting. Through this paper, we can not only have a clearer understanding of the weighting methods in the scholarly impact assessment, but also think more deeply about the weighting factors to be explored.