Will Your Paper Get Promoted by a Citation? A Case Study of Citation Promoter in Computer Science Discipline

Reseachers have investigated numerous factors influencing citation counts of cited papers. One factor investigated has been the number of gained citations, as this could increase the visibility of cited papers and subsequently induce further citations. In this paper, aiming to identify a particular kind of citation that could trigger a rapid growth in the citation counts of cited papers, a concept of "citation promoter" was proposed. We defined citation promoters based on the annual citation rates of the cited papers and the co-citation counts received by the pair of cited and citing papers. The comparative results showed that papers would obtain a sharp rise in citation counts shortly after they were cited by citation promoters. Papers that received citation promoters at an early age outperformed other papers in long-term citation counts. In addition, we developed a classification model for predicting whether a citing paper would be a citation promoter for its cited paper. Since it was a class imbalanced problem (4 percent positive instances), and there was a lack of content and author features in our dataset, our preliminary models achieved moderate performance with an F1 score slightly higher than 0.5, while the F1 score obtained by random guessing was 0.07.