Citation counts prediction of statistical publications based on multi-layer academic networks via neural network model

Citation counts is a crucial factor in evaluating the quality of research papers. Therefore, it is vital to accurately predict citation counts and explore the mechanisms underlying citations. In this study, we focus on predicting the citation counts in the field of statistics. We collect 55,024 academic papers published in 43 statistics journals between 2001 and 2018. Furthermore, we collect and clean a high-quality dataset and then construct multi-layer networks from different perspectives, including journal networks, author citation networks, co-citation networks, co-authorship networks, and keyword co-occurrence networks. Additionally, we extract 77 factors for citation counts prediction, including 22 traditional and 55 network-related factors. To address the issues of zero-inflated and over-dispersed citation counts, a neural network model is designed to achieve high prediction accuracy. Furthermore, we adopt a leave-one-feature-out approach to investigate the importance of these factors. The proposed neural network model achieves an MAE value of 7.352, which outperforms other machine learning models in the comparison. Thus, this study provides a useful guide for researchers to predict citation counts and can be easily extended to other research fields.