It is not What but Who you Know: A Time-Sensitive Collaboration Impact Measure of Researchers in Surrounding Communities

In the last decades, many measures and metrics have been proposed with the goal of automatically providing quantitative rather than qualitative indications over researchers' academic productions. However, when evaluating a researcher, most of the commonly-applied measures do not consider one of the key aspect of every research work: the collaborations among researchers and, more specifically, the impact that each co-author has on the scientific production of another. In fact, in an evaluation process, some co-authored works can unconditionally favor researchers working in competitive research environments surrounded by experts able to lead high-quality research projects, where state-of-the-art measures usually fail in trying to distinguish co-authors from their pure publication history. In the light of this, instead of focusing on a pure quantitative/qualitative evaluation of curricula, we propose a novel temporal model for formalizing and estimating the dependence of a researcher on individual collaborations, over time, in surrounding communities. We then implemented and evaluated our model with a set of experiments on real case scenarios and through an extensive user study.