H2CGL: Modeling Dynamics of Citation Network for Impact Prediction

Assessing the potential impact of papers is of great significance to both academia and industry (Wang, Song and Barabási, 2013), especially given the exponential annual growth in the number of papers (Lo, Wang, Neumann, Kinney and Weld, 2020; Chu and Evans, 2021; Xue, He, Liu, Jiang, Zhao and Lu, 2023). As the numerical value of the scientific impact could be difficult to determine, citation count is frequently employed as a rough estimate (Evans and Reimer, 2009; Sinatra, Wang, Deville, Song and Barabási, 2016; Jiang, Koch and Sun, 2021). Actually, the dynamics in citation networks cannot be ignored. For example, the "sleeping beauties" (Van Raan, 2004) phenomenon indicates that the citations of a paper can vary considerably in different time periods. Besides the content quality, the future citations of a paper will be influenced by newly published papers (Funk and Owen-Smith, 2017; Park, Leahey and Funk, 2023). New papers may be successors to older ones, discovering the importance of previous works, thereby drawing more citations for them; or new papers may be competing with older ones, correcting or improving the previous works, thus making them lose potential citations. Therefore, it's imperative to capture dynamics of the citation network to accurately predict the future citations of a target paper. Previous studies within informetrics have primarily concentrated on content information or citation networks of papers.