A Study on Paper and Author Ranking

As the number of journal issues, conferences and the overall scientific literature have been increasing at an exponential rate, it has become challenging for researchers to find appropriate and useful papers from the vast literature available to them. To solve this issue citation count, h-index, i10-index are used to rank authors. In 1998, Brin and Page introduced the algorithm PageRank which is also used in the scientific community for ranking research papers and authors. However, each of these metrics has its own drawbacks. We hypothesize that papers unveiling deeper truth are often not as well cited as those that are more challenging for a wider number of authors to assimilate and appreciate their works. So a simple count of the number of citations may fail to capture the essence of the quality of a paper. With a view to addressing this issue, we have introduced a new algorithm that also takes into account the quality of the researcher citing an article, and considers it in ranking. We have carried out experiments. While the experiments are not as comprehensive, results have been incorporated. They look promising in ranking authors and papers that are not cited too often due to difficulty in understanding them.