Ranking scholarly work based on author reputation

Abstract

Who is an authoritative author in a particular field is a common question that every learner or researcher wants to know. The widely available scholarly work from authors in different fields is typically indexed on various platforms like Google Scholar, DBLP, etc. Each platform uses various ranking algorithms to evaluate reputation of work based on the criteria of relevance, time and citation counts. In this paper, we focus on ascertaining reputation to authors publishing scholarly work by extending the present concept of citation index. Our first contribution is that we propose a novel method of ranking authors based on not just their citation count but also on the reputation of authors who have been citing their work. Intuitively, this means that an author would have a better rank (or reputation / authority) if he or she is cited by other reputed authors than the author who is cited by less reputed authors. Further, our second contribution is that our proposed author rank is used to rank scholarly articles, which until now has been based on citation counts and other metrics, when a user searches using a search keyword. A scholarly work is given higher ranking if it is written by reputed authors. Results show that authors with higher citation count may receive a lower rank than those with lower citation count due to the quality of the citations (reputation of authors citing them) that is being received. Our work can immensely help students (learners and researchers) find authoritative authors and papers in a field of interest by employing our proposed ranking metric which is based on the reputation of authors who are citing a research work.