To better stand on the shoulder of giants

Usually scientists breed research ideas inspired by previous publications, but they are unlikely to follow all publications in the unbounded literature collection. The volume of literature keeps on expanding extremely fast, whilst not all papers contribute equal impact to the academic society. Being aware of potentially influential literature would put one in an advanced position in choosing important research references. Hence, estimation of potential influence is of great significance. We study a challenging problem of identifying potentially influential literature. We examine a set of hypotheses on what are the fundamental characteristics for highly cited papers and find some interesting patterns. Based on these observations, we learn to identify potentially influential literature via Future Influence Prediction (FIP), which aims to estimate the future influence of literature. The system takes a series of features of a particular publication as input and produces as output the estimated citation counts of that article after a given time period. We consider several regression models to formulate the learning process and evaluate their performance based on the coefficient of determination (R2). Experimental results on a real-large data set show a mean average predictive performance of 83.6% measured in R^2. We apply the learned model to the application of bibliography recommendation and obtain prominent performance improvement in terms of Mean Average Precision (MAP).