Time-aware PageRank for bibliographic networks

In the past, recursive algorithms, such as PageRank originally conceived for the Web, have been successfully used to rank nodes in the citation networks of papers, authors, or journals. They have proved to determine prestige and not popularity, unlike citation counts. However, bibliographic networks, in contrast to the Web, have some specific features that enable the assigning of different weights to citations, thus adding more information to the process of finding prominence. For example, a citation between two authors may be weighed according to whether and when those two authors collaborated with each other, which is information that can be found in the co-authorship network. In this study, we define a couple of PageRank modifications that weigh citations between authors differently based on the information from the co-authorship graph. In addition, we put emphasis on the time of publications and citations. We test our algorithms on the Web of Science data of computer science journal articles and determine the most prominent computer scientists in the 10-year period of 1996–2005. Besides a correlation analysis, we also compare our rankings to the lists of ACM A. M. Turing Award and ACM SIGMOD E. F. Codd Innovations Award winners and find the new time-aware methods to outperform standard PageRank and its time-unaware weighted variants.

► PageRank modifications are proposed that take account of the time of publications, citations, and author collaborations.
► The novel methods along with other bibliometric techniques are applied to a data set of computer science journal articles from 1996 to 2005.
► The most prominent computer scientists are detected and compared to the lists of ACM A. M. Turing Award and ACM SIGMOD E. F. Codd Innovations Award winners.