The local structure of citation networks uncovers expert-selected milestone papers.

• We compare the performance of global metrics and their local variants in the identification of expert-selected milestone papers on two distinct citation datasets. • We obtain a family of local variants of PageRank (LeaderRank) with a tunable degree of locality and find they can generate highly correlated scores with the scores by the original metrics. • The local variants of PageRank (LeaderRank) perform similarly well as the original global PageRank (LeaderRank) algorithms in the identification of seminal papers. • The local variants of PageRank (LeaderRank) perform significantly better than local metrics such as citation count, h-index and semi-local centrality. • Compared to network-based global metrics, the proposed local estimates provide a better trade-off between performance and computational efficiency. Recent works aimed to understand how to identify "milestone" scientific papers of great significance from large-scale citation networks. To this end, previous results found that global ranking metrics that take into account the whole network structure (such as Google's PageRank) outperform local metrics such as the citation count. Here, we show that by leveraging the recursive equation that defines the PageRank algorithm, we can propose a family of local impact metrics. Our results reveal that the obtained PageRank-based local metrics outperform the citation count and other local metrics in identifying the seminal papers. Compared with global metrics, these local metrics can reach similar performance in the identification of seminal papers in shorter computational time, without requiring the whole network topology. Our findings could help to better understand the nature of groundbreaking research from citation network analysis and find practical applications in large-scale data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]