Quantifying a Paper’s Academic Impact by Distinguishing the Unequal Intensities and Contributions of Citations

Citation count is a widely-used indicator for calculating the academic impact of scientific papers, but it is limited because it assumes all citations are of similar value and weights each equally. By examining the influence changes in papers’ citation distribution and the cited papers’ unequal contributions to the citing ones, this study aims to distinguish citations and, on this basis, evaluate the academic impact of the papers. Three indices of time-weighted citation count, citation width and citation depth are proposed to distinguish citations and perform the evaluation task. The experimental results show that papers exhibit different influence intensity characteristics in different periods of citation life. Those papers got larger citations in recent years are more influential and more active to gain new citations. The papers show the different scope of influence in their citing environment, although they were originally published in the same journal and the same year. In addition, the different frequency of mentions and the different subject similarities with the citing works suggest that the papers have different importance and usefulness for subsequent research. These results suggest that these three indices do help to distinguish citations and reveal the different intensity and contribution of influences in citations. Finally, the three indices are integrated into the overall evaluation of the academic impact of the paper, and the weight of each index is calculated by the entropy weight method. Quite different overall impacts in the paper are shown due to their different performances in the three indices, even though they have the same total number of citations.