Predicting the Dynamics of Research Impact

<p>This book provides its readers with an introduction to interesting prediction and science dynamics problems in the field of Science of Science. Prediction<i> </i>focuses on the forecasting of future performance (or impact) of an entity either a research article or a scientist and also the prediction of future links in collaboration networks or identifying missing links in citation networks. </p><p>The single chapters are written in a way that help the reader gain a detailed technical understanding of the corresponding subjects the strength and weaknesses of the state-of-the-art approaches for each described problem and the currently open challenges. While chapter 1 provides a useful contribution in the theoretical foundations of the fields of scientometrics and science of science chapters 2-4 turn the focal point to the study of factors that affect research impact and its dynamics. Chapters 5-7 then focus on article-level measures that quantify the current and future impact of scientific articles. Next chapters 8-10 investigate subjects relevant to predicting the future impact of individual researchers. Finally chapters 11-13 focus on science evolution and dynamics leveraging heterogeneous and interconnected data where the analysis of research topic trends and their evolution has always played a key role in impact prediction approaches and quantitative analyses in the field of bibliometrics. Each chapter can be read independently since it includes a detailed description of the problem being investigated along with a thorough discussion and study of the respective state-of-the-art. </p>Due to the cross-disciplinary character of the Science of Science field the book may be useful to interested readers from a variety of disciplines like information science information retrieval network science informetrics scientometrics and machine learning to name a few. The profiles of the readers may also be diverse ranging from researchers and professors inthe respective fields to students and developers being curious about the covered subjects.