Network-driven reputation in online scientific communities

Liao, Hao; Xiao, Rui; Cimini, Giulio; Medo, Matúš

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0112022

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Journal article

Network-driven reputation in online scientific communities

Liao, Hao Physics Department, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Xiao, Rui Physics Department, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Cimini, Giulio Institute for Complex Systems (ISC-CNR) and Department of Physics, “Sapienza” University of Rome, Italy
Medo, Matúš Physics Department, University of Fribourg, Switzerland

02.12.2014

Published in:

PLoS ONE. - 2014, vol. 9, no. 12, p. e112022

English The ever-increasing quantity and complexity of scientific production have made it difficult for researchers to keep track of advances in their own fields. This, together with growing popularity of online scientific communities, calls for the development of effective information filtering tools. We propose here an algorithm which simultaneously computes reputation of users and fitness of papers in a bipartite network representing an online scientific community. Evaluation on artificially-generated data and real data from the Econophysics Forum is used to determine the method's best-performing variants. We show that when the input data is extended to a multilayer network including users, papers and authors and the algorithm is correspondingly modified, the resulting performance improves on multiple levels. In particular, top papers have higher citation count and top authors have higher h-index than top papers and top authors chosen by other algorithms. We finally show that our algorithm is robust against persistent authors (spammers) which makes the method readily applicable to the existing online scientific communities.

Faculty

Faculté des sciences et de médecine

Department

Département de Physique

Language