AdaWIRL: A Novel Bayesian Ranking Approach for Personal Big-Hit Paper Prediction

Predicting the most impactful (big-hit) paper among a researcher's publications so it can be well disseminated in advance not only has a large impact on individual academic success, but also provides useful guidance to the research community. In this work, we tackle the problem of given the corpus of a researcher's publications in previous few years, how to effectively predict which paper will become the big-hit in the future. We explore a series of features that can drive a paper to become the big-hit, and design a novel Bayesian ranking algorithm AdaWIRL (Adaptive Weighted Impact Ranking Learning) that leverages a weighted training schema and an adaptive timely false correction strategy to predict big-hit papers. Experimental results on the large ArnetMiner dataset with over 1.7 million authors and 2 million papers demonstrate the effectiveness of AdaWIRL. Specifically, it correctly predicts over 78.3% of all researchers' big-hit papers and outperforms the compared regression and ranking algorithms, with an average of 5.8% and 2.9% improvement respectively. Further analysis shows that temporal features are the best indicator for personal big-hit papers, while authorship and social features are less relevant. We also demonstrate that there is a high correlation between the impact of a researcher's future works and their similarity to the predicted big-hit paper.