Coranking the Future Influence of Multiobjects in Bibliographic Network Through Mutual Reinforcement

Scientific literature ranking is essential to help researchers find valuable publications from a large literature collection. Recently, with the prevalence of webpage ranking algorithms such as PageRank and HITS, graph-based algorithms have been widely used to iteratively rank papers and researchers through the networks formed by citation and coauthor relationships. However, existing graph-based ranking algorithms mostly focus on ranking the current importance of literature. For researchers who enter an emerging research area, they might be more interested in new papers and young researchers that are likely to become influential in the future, since such papers and researchers are more helpful in letting them quickly catch up on the most recent advances and find valuable research directions. Meanwhile, although some works have been proposed to rank the prestige of a certain type of objects with the help of multiple networks formed of multiobjects, there still lacks a unified framework to rank multiple types of objects in the bibliographic network simultaneously. In this article, we propose a unified ranking framework MRCoRank to corank the future popularity of four types of objects: papers, authors, terms, and venues through mutual reinforcement. Specifically, because the citation data of new publications are sparse and not efficient to characterize their innovativeness, we make the first attempt to extract the text features to help characterize innovative papers and authors. With the observation that the current trend is more indicative of the future trend of citation and coauthor relationships, we then construct time-aware weighted graphs to quantify the importance of links established at different times on both citation and coauthor graphs. By leveraging both the constructed text features and time-aware graphs, we finally fuse the rich information in a mutual reinforcement ranking framework to rank the future importance of multiobjects simultaneously. We evaluate the proposed model through extensive experiments on the ArnetMiner dataset containing more than 1,500,000 papers. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of MRCoRank in coranking the future influence of multiobjects in a bibliographic network.