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Impact of field of study (FoS) on authors’ citation trend

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Abstract

A significant aspect in scientific research is evaluating the impact of scientific contribution of an author. Authors select a particular Field of Study (FoS) to work in, based on their interest and/or by considering the currently hot topics. One aspect that may support in the selection of their research area is the future impact of their work. There are multiple studies in literature that focus on FoS trend detection and analysis etc. However, the previous work contains a gap, that is, effect of following an FoS on citation trend of scientific authors is not explored. The outcome of such a study may help a researcher in deciding his future research direction. In this research, we have proposed an approach that detects the FoS of an individual author in his/her career years by characterizing the focus of his work. Citation trend of an author based on yearly citation count is computed. The trend of an FoS is computed by combining citation trend of authors belonging to same FoS. This trend is used as an input to predict next years’ citation counts, by using Multiple Linear Regression and Artificial Neural Network. The scientific articles published from 1950 to 2017 in the domain of Computer Science are used from Microsoft Academic Graph dataset. The experimental results show that there is higher similarity between citation trend of authors that belong to the same FoS as compared to different FoS and also resembles more to the overall citation trend of that particular FoS. Hence concluded that FoS trend following has a certain impact on the citation count of authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Capital University of Science and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Lubna Zafar & Nayyer Masood

  2. Department of CS & IT, Mirpur University of Science and Technology, Mirpur AJ&K, Pakistan

    Samreen Ayaz

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  1. Lubna Zafar
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  2. Nayyer Masood
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  3. Samreen Ayaz
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Correspondence to Samreen Ayaz.

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Zafar, L., Masood, N. & Ayaz, S. Impact of field of study (FoS) on authors’ citation trend. Scientometrics 128, 2557–2576 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04660-2

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