Towards a Social Trust Based Measure of Scientific Productivity

Quantifying scientific productivity has traditionally been one of the major areas of research. An important component in measuring the scientific productivity of a researcher has been the number and citation count of his publications. However, that citation based measures of scientific productivity are influenced by domain specific factors like the popularity of the research domain, the key topics within the domain, as well as temporal factors like aging, these measures may not suitably reflect the contribution of a researcher uniformly across all domains. In this paper, we introduce social trust on a researcher in a given domain as a measure of his scientific productivity and success. We argue that trust in scientific domain is a social component that indicates the productivity and can influence several parameters like the collaborations of the researchers as well as the citations received by their publications. Unlike citation count of publications, trust is not domain specific and hence can be used uniformly across all domains to measure the scientific productivity.Our proposed measure of trust relies on a trust-based network of authors (nodes), where a link between two nodes is based on social indicators like co-authorship and citation counts. We validate the correctness as well as effectiveness of our proposed approach empirically using the ArnetMiner dataset. Observations indicate that the proposed measure not only mitigates the aging issues prevalent in citation based measures but can also predict the possibility of future success of the researchers in terms of citation count.