A PageRank-Based Method for Indentifying Field-Specific Key Researchers

Abstract

When embarking on a new field of research, it is of importance to review particular journal papers with high quality, written by revered figures in the academic community. This project is motivated by the desire to distinguish key researchers in respective academic disciplines. Traditional indices, such as h-index, only indicate overall performance of an individual. However, most of researchers generally contribute to more than one specific field of research during their whole academic career, implying that it is impractical and insufficient to use h-index as an indicator to track a leading researcher from the community. In this thesis, we proposed a novel PageRank-based scheme named "AuthorRank" for identifying key authors in specific fields of research. Our result suggested that the proposed ranking system performed much better than the conventional counterpart.

Date of Award	May 2015
Original language	American English
Supervisor	U Zeyar Aung (Supervisor)