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Article Category: Research Paper
Published Online: Jul 28, 2020
Page range: 57 - 70
Received: Jan 31, 2020
Accepted: Jun 11, 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jdis-2020-0031
Keywords
© 2020 Wataru Souma et al., published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Purpose
The number of citations has been widely used to measure the significance of a paper. However, there is a need in introducing another index to determine superiority or inferiority of papers with the same number of citations. We determine superiority or inferiority of papers by using the ranking based on the number of citations and PageRank.
Design/methodology/approach
We show the positive linear correlation between Citation Rank (the ranking of the number of citation) and PageRank. On this basis, we identify high-quality, prestige, emerging, and popular papers.
Findings
We found that the high-quality papers belong to the subjects of biochemistry and molecular biology, chemistry, and multidisciplinary sciences. The prestige papers correspond to the subjects of computer science, engineering, and information science. The emerging papers are related to biochemistry and molecular biology, as well as those published in the journal “Cell.” The popular papers belong to the subject of multidisciplinary sciences.
Research limitations
We analyze the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) from 1981 to 2015 to calculate Citation Rank and PageRank within a citation network consisting of 34,666,719 papers and 591,321,826 citations.
Practical implications
Our method is applicable to forecast emerging fields of research subjects in science and helps policymakers to consider science policy.
Originality/value
We calculated PageRank for a giant citation network which is extremely larger than the citation networks investigated by previous researchers.