Identifying the Key Reference of a Scientific Publication.

The most fundamental way to measure the impact of a scientific publication is using the number of citations it received. Though citation count and its variants are widely adopted, they have been pointed out to be poor proxies for a paper's quality because a citation might result from different reasons. It is thus crucial to quantify the true relevance of the cited papers to the citing paper. There are already some efforts in the literature devoted to addressing this issue, yet a well-accepted method is still lacking, possibly due to the absence of standard ground truth data for comparing different methods. In this paper, we propose a simple method using a local diffusion process on citation networks for identifying the key references for each scientific publication. The effectiveness and of the method are validated in a subset of the American Physical Society data in which the key references are mentioned in the abstract of papers. We further define an effective citation metric for quantifying the actual impact of each paper and its evolution. The effective citation metric additionally reveals the citation preference of research at journal and country levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]