Quantifying the topic disparity of scientific articles

Autor: Kim, Munjung, Yoon, Jisung, Jung, Woo-Sung, Kim, Hyunuk
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Druh dokumentu: Working Paper
Popis: Citation count is a popular index for assessing scientific papers. However, it depends on not only the quality of a paper but also various factors, such as conventionality, team size, and gender. Here, we examine the extent to which the conventionality of a paper is related to its citation percentile in a discipline by using our measure, topic disparity. The topic disparity is the cosine distance between a paper and its discipline on a neural embedding space. Using this measure, we show that the topic disparity is negatively associated with the citation percentile in many disciplines, even after controlling team size and the genders of the first and last authors. This result indicates that less conventional research tends to receive fewer citations than conventional research. Our proposed method can be used to complement the raw citation counts and to recommend papers at the periphery of a discipline because of their less conventional topics.
Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, Submitted to the 2nd International Workshop on Scientific Knowledge: Representation, Discovery, and Assessment
Databáze: arXiv