An Evaluation Method for Vital Researchers within the Bipartite Scientific Collaboration Network

In this paper, a bipartite scientific collaboration network is constructed to identify the vital researchers in a scientific research group. There are two kinds of vertices in the network, where one kind of vertices represent the researchers and the other ones illustrate the papers. The edges are connected to the vertices which belong to two different classes. Through the bipartite network, a model is developed to evaluate the researcher's importance within the research group by introducing four indices. Such indices are relative ranking value, professional title, paper quality and co-author importance, respectively. Accordingly, two algorithms are developed, one is to compute the impact probability between papers and researchers, and the other one aims to calculate the cooperation probability between researchers. Evaluation results show the proposed model works well by comparing with other evaluating indices.