Bibliometric impact measures leveraging topic analysis

  • Authors:
  • Gideon S. Mann;David Mimno;Andrew McCallum

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA;University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA;University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Measurements of the impact and history of research literature provide a useful complement to scientific digital library collections. Bibliometric indicators have been extensively studied, mostly in the context of journals. However, journal-based metrics poorly capture topical distinctions in fast-moving fields, and are increasingly problematic with the rise of open-access publishing. Recent developments in latent topic models have produced promising results for automatic sub-field discovery. The fine-grained, faceted topics produced by such models provide a clearer view of the topical divisions of a body of research literature and the interactions between those divisions. We demonstrate the usefulness of topic models in measuring impact by applying a new phrase-based topic discovery model to a collection of 300,000 Computer Science publications, collected by the Rexa automatic citation indexing system.