Tian Zheng

Speaker: Tian Zheng, Professor, Dept. of Statistics, Columbia University
Title: Topic-Adjusted Visibility Metric for Scientific Articles
Date: November 6, 2020
Time: 1:30 pm (PST)
Location: Remote delivery
Note: Also a PIMS Distinguished Speaker Lecture

Abstract

Measuring the impact of scientific articles is important for evaluating the research output of individual scientists, academic institutions, and journals. While citations are raw data for constructing impact measures, there exist biases and potential issues if factors affecting citation patterns are not properly accounted for. In this work, we address the problem of field variation and introduce an article-level metric useful for evaluating individual articles’ visibility. This measure derives from joint probabilistic modeling of the content in the articles and the citations among them using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and the mixed membership stochastic blockmodel (MMSB). Our proposed model provides a visibility metric for individual articles adjusted for field variation in citation rates, a structural understanding of citation behavior in different fields, and article recommendations that take into account article visibility and citation patterns.