Towards predicting academic impact from mainstream news and weblogs: A heterogeneous graph based approach

Abstract

The realization that scholarly publications are discussed and have influence on discourse outside scientific and academic domains has given rise to area of scientometrics called alternative metrics or “altmetrics”. Furthermore, researchers in this field tend to focus primarily on measuring scientific activity on social media platforms such as Twitter, however these count-based metrics are vulnerable to gaming because they tend to lack concrete justification or reference to the primary source. In this collaboration with Elsevier, we extend the conventional citation graph to a heterogeneous graph of publications, scientists, venues, organizations and more authoritative media sources such as mainstream news and weblogs. Our approach consists of two parts: one is integrating the bibliometric data with the social data such as blogs, mainstream news. The other involves understanding how standard graph-based metrics can be used to predict the academic impact. Our result showed the computed graph-based metrics can reasonably predict the academic impact of early stage researchers.