| Through academic publications, the authors of these publications form a social network. Instead of sharing casual thoughts and photos (as in Facebook), authors pick co-authors and reference papers written by other authors. Thanks to various efforts (such as Microsoft Libra, DBLP and APS), the data necessary for analyzing the academic social network is becoming more available on the Internet. What type of information and queries would be useful for users to find out, beyond the search queries already available from services such as Google Scholar? In this thesis, we explore this question by defining a variety of ranking metrics on different entities - authors, publication venues and institutions. We go beyond traditional metrics such as paper counts, citations and h-index. Specifically, we define metrics such as influence, connections and exposure for authors. An author gains influence by receiving more citations, but also citations from influential authors. An author increases his/her connections by co-authoring with other authors, and specially from other authors with high connections. An author receives exposure by publishing in selective venues where publications received high citations in the past, and the selectivity of these venues also depends on the influence of the authors who publish there. We discuss the computation aspects of these metrics, and similarity between different metrics. With additional information of author-institution relationships, we are able to study institution rankings based on the corresponding authors' rankings for each type of metric as well as different domains. We are prepared to demonstrate these ideas with a web site (http://pubstat.org) built from millions of publications and authors.;Another common challenge in bibliometrics studies is how to deal with incorrect or incomplete data. Given a large volume of data, however, there often exists certain relationships between data items that allow us to recover missing data items and correct erroneous data. In the latter part of the thesis, we study a particular problem of this sort - estimating the missing year information associated with publications (and hence authors' years of active publication). We first propose a simple algorithm that only makes use of the "direct" information, such as paper citation/reference relationships or paper-author relation- ships. The result of this simple algorithm is used as a benchmark for comparison. Our goal is to develop algorithms that increase both the coverage (the percentage of missing year papers recovered) and accuracy (mean absolute error of the estimated year to the real year). We propose some advanced algorithms that ex- tend inference by information propagation. For each algorithm, we propose three versions according to the given academic social network type: a) Homogeneous (only contains paper citation links), b) Bipartite (only contains paper-author relations), and, c) Heterogeneous (both paper citation and paper-author relations). We carry out experiments on the three public data sets (Microsoft Libra, DBLP and APS), and evaluated by applying the K-fold cross validation method. We show that the advanced algorithms can improve both coverage and accuracy. |
