Fusion of the Power from Citations: Enhance your Influence by Integrating Information from References

Influence prediction plays a crucial role in the academic community. The amount of scholars' influence determines whether their work will be accepted by others. Most existing research focuses on predicting one paper's citation count after a period or identifying the most influential papers among the massive candidates, without concentrating on an individual paper's negative or positive impact on its authors. Thus, this study aims to formulate the prediction problem to identify whether one paper can increase scholars' influence or not, which can provide feedback to the authors before they publish their papers. First, we presented the self-adapted ACC (Average Annual Citation Counts) metric to measure authors' impact yearly based on their annual published papers, paper citation counts, and contributions in each paper. Then, we proposed the RD-GAT (Reference-Depth Graph Attention Network) model to integrate heterogeneous graph information from different depth of references by assigning attention coefficients on them. Experiments on AMiner dataset demonstrated that the proposed ACC metrics could represent the authors influence effectively, and the RD-GAT model is more efficiently on the academic citation network, and have stronger robustness against the overfitting problem compared with the baseline models. By applying the framework in this work, scholars can identify whether their papers can improve their influence in the future.