A Graph-based Topic Modeling Approach to Detection of Irrelevant Citations

In the recent years, the academic paper influence analysis has been widely studied due to its potential applications in the multiple areas of science information metric and retrieval. By identifying the academic influence of papers, authors, etc., we can directly support researchers to easily reach academic papers. These recommended candidate papers are not only highly relevant with their desired research topics but also highly-attended by the research community within these topics. For very recent years, the rapid developments of academic networks, like Google Scholar, Research Gate, CiteSeerX, etc., have significantly boosted the number of new published papers annually. It also helps to strengthen the borderless cooperation between researchers who are interested on the same research topics. However, these current academic networks still lack the capabilities of provisioning researchers deeper into most-influenced papers. They also largely ignore quite/irrelevant papers, which are not fully related with their current interest topics. Moreover, the distributions of topics within these academic papers are considered as varying and it is difficult to extract the main concentrated topics in these papers. Thus, it leads to challenges for researchers to find their appropriated/high-qualified reference resources while doing researches. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we proposed a novel approach of paper influence analysis through their content-based and citation relationship-based analyses within the biographical network. In order to effectively extract the topic-based relevance from papers, we apply the integrated graph-based citation relationship analysis with topic modeling approach to automatically learn the distributions of keyword-based labeled topics in forms of unsupervised learning approach, named as TopCite. Then, we base on the constructed graph-based paper-topic structure to identify their relevancy levels. Upon the identified relevancy levels between papers, we can support for improving the accuracy performance of other bibliographic network mining tasks, such as paper similarity measurement, recommendation, etc. Extensive experiments in real-world AMiner bibliographic dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed ideas in this paper.