Article ranking with location-based weight in contextual citation network

This paper proposes a method to evaluate academic impact that focuses on spatial context in which citations occur in sections of citing papers. Previous studies measured impact of papers using external factors such as journals, time, and authors. However, these methods overlooks context of citations, leading to problem of treating papers with same citation counts equivalently. To overcome this issue, we designed a citation network by reflecting on the spatial context in which cited papers are cited in the citing paper and measured their impact. Spatial context is defined by the specific section of the citing paper (Introduction, Method, Result, Discussion, Conclusion) where the citation appears. We collected 818 citing papers and 13,257 cited papers from 2013–2022 from Journal of Informetrics and constructed a context-reflected citation network. Further, we utilized CRITIC method and weighted PageRank algorithm for measuring section-specific weights and impact. Results obtained in this study suggest that the impact of cited papers varies significantly depending on the section context in which they appear. We use Kendall τ coefficient for analyzing correlation between “times cited” rankings and contextual PageRank. The Kendall τ coefficient between two ranks for entire dataset is 0.473. This study provides a multidimensional framework to assess the impact of academic papers, suggesting that future evaluations should consider not only the number of citations but also their context.