Predicting citation counts based on deep neural network learning techniques

With the growing number of published scientific papers world-wide, the need to evaluation and quality assessment methods for research papers is increasing. Scientific fields such as scientometrics, informetrics, and bibliometrics establish quantified analysis methods and measurements for evaluating scientific papers. In this area, an important problem is to predict the future influence of a published paper. Particularly, early discrimination between influential papers and insignificant papers may find important applications. In this regard, one of the most important metrics is the number of citations to the paper, since this metric is widely utilized in the evaluation of scientific publications and moreover, it serves as the basis for many other metrics such as h-index. In this paper, we propose a novel method for predicting long-term citations of a paper based on the number of its citations in the first few years after publication. In order to train a citation count prediction model, we employed artificial neural network which is a powerful machine learning tool with recently growing applications in many domains including image and text processing. The empirical experiments show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with respect to the prediction accuracy in both yearly and total prediction of the number of citations. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.