Papers › On the Predictability of Utilizing Rank Percentile to Evaluate Scientific Impact

On the Predictability of Utilizing Rank Percentile to Evaluate Scientific Impact

30 Mar 2021arXiv:2103.16025links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

Sen Tian, Panos Ipeirotis

The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.

Bibliographic metrics are commonly utilized for evaluation purposes within academia, often in conjunction with other metrics. These metrics vary widely across fields and change with the seniority of the scholar; consequently, the only way to interpret these values is by comparison with other academics within the same field who are of similar seniority. Among the field- and time- normalized indicators, rank percentile has grown in popularity, and it is preferred over other types of indicators. In this paper, we propose and justify a novel rank percentile indicator for scholars. Furthermore, we emphasize on the time factor that is built into the rank percentile, and we demonstrate that the rank percentile is highly predictable. The publication percentile is highly stable over time, while the scholar percentile exhibits short-term stability and can be predicted via a simple linear regression model. More advanced models that utilize extensive lists of features offer slightly superior performance; however, the simplicity and interpretability of the simple model impose significant advantages over the additional complexity of other models.

PaperPDFCode

Code

sentian/SciImpactRanking officialmentioned in paper report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections