Scientific footprints in digital libraries

[journal]

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Claudia Ifrim, Xenia Koulouri, Manolis Wallace, Florin Pop, Mariana Mocanu and Valentin Cristea, Scientific footprints in digital libraries, Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence, pp 91-118, vol XXVI, 2017. The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59268-8_5

Abstract

In recent years, members of the academic community have increasingly turned to digital libraries to follow the latest work within their own field and to estimate papers', journals' and researchers’ impact. Yet, despite the powerful indexing and searching tools available, identifying the most important works and authors in a field remains a challenging task, for which a wealth of prior information is needed; existing systems fail to identify and incorporate in their results information regarding connections between publications of different disciplines. In this paper we analyze citation lists in order to not only quantify but also understand impact, by tracing the ``footprints'' that authors have left, i.e. the specific areas in which they have made an impact. We use the publication medium (specific journal or conference) to identify the thematic scope of each paper and feed from existing digital libraries that index scientific activity, namely Google Scholar and DBLP. This allows us to design and develop a system, the Footprint Analyzer, that can be used to successfully identify the most prominent works and authors for each scientific field, regardless of whether their own research is limited to or even focused on the specific field. Various real life examples demonstrate the proposed concepts and actual results from the developed system's operation prove the applicability and validity.

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