Breakthrough paper indicator 2.0: can geographical diversity and interdisciplinarity improve the accuracy of outstanding papers prediction?

• Published in: Scientometrics 2014-09, Vol.100 (3), p.755-765
• Main Authors: Ponomarev, Ilya V., Lawton, Brian K., Williams, Duane E., Schnell, Joshua D.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bibliometrics. Scientometrics; Bibliometrics. Scientometrics. Evaluation; Citations; Computer Science; Exact sciences and technology; Geography; Information and communication sciences; Information science. Documentation; Information Storage and Retrieval; Interdisciplinary subjects; Library and information science. General aspects; Library Science; Predictions; Scholarly publishing; Sciences and techniques of general use
• ISSN: 0138-9130; 1588-2861
• DOI: 10.1007/s11192-014-1320-9

We report progress on new developments in the breakthrough paper indicator, which allows early selection of a small group of publications which may become potential breakthrough candidates based on dynamics of publication citations and certain qualitative characteristics of citations. We used a quantitative approach to identify typical citation patterns of highly cited papers. Based on these analyses, we propose two forecasting models to select groups of breakthrough paper candidates that exceed high citation thresholds five years post-publication. Here we study whether interdisciplinarity in the subject categories or geographical diversity serve as possible measures to improve ranking of breakthrough paper candidates. We found that ranked geographical diversities of known breakthrough papers have equal or better ranks than corresponding citations ranks. This allows us to apply additional filtering for better identifications of breakthrough candidates. We studied several interdisciplinarity indices, including richness, Shannon index, Simpson index, and Rao-Stirling-Porter index. We did not find any correlations between citation ranks and ranked interdisciplinarity indices.