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As the rate at which scientific work is published continues to increase, so does the need to discern high-impact publications. In recent years, there have been several approaches that seek to rank publications based on their expected citation-based impact. Despite this level of attention, this research area has not been systematically studied. Past literature often fails to distinguish between short-term impact, the current popularity of an article, and long-term impact, the overall influence of an article. Moreover, the evaluation methodologies applied vary widely and are inconsistent. In this work, we aim to fill these gaps, studying impact-based ranking theoretically and experimentally. First, we provide explicit definitions for short-term and long-term impact, and introduce the associated ranking problems. Then, we identify and classify the most important ideas employed by state-of-the-art methods. After studying various evaluation methodologies of the literature, we propose a specific benchmark framework that can help us better differentiate effectiveness across impact aspects. Using this framework we investigate: (1) the practical difference between ranking by short- and long-term impact, and (2) the effectiveness and efficiency of ranking methods in different settings. To avoid reporting results that are discipline-dependent, we perform our experiments using four datasets from different scientific disciplines.

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, a large number of relevant articles have been published or become available in preprint servers. These articles, along with earlier related literature, compose a valuable knowledge base affecting contemporary research studies or even government actions to limit the spread of the disease, and directing treatment decisions taken by physicians. However, the number of such articles is increasing at an intense rate, making the exploration of the relevant literature and the identification of useful knowledge challenging. In this work, we describe BIP4COVID19, an open data set that offers a variety of impact measures for coronavirus-related scientific articles. These measures can be exploited for the creation or extension of added-value services aiming to facilitate the exploration of the respective literature, alleviating the aforementioned issue. In the same context, as a use case, we provide a publicly accessible keyword-based search interface for COVID-19-related articles, which leverages our data to rank search results according to the calculated impact indicators.

The constantly increasing rate at which scientific papers are published makes it difficult for researchers to identify papers that currently impact the research field of their interest. Hence, approaches to effectively identify papers of high impact have attracted great attention in the past. In this work, we present a method that seeks to rank papers based on their estimated short-term impact, as measured by the number of citations received in the near future. Similar to previous work, our method models a researcher as she explores the paper citation network. The key aspect is that we incorporate an attention-based mechanism, akin to a time-restricted version of preferential attachment, to explicitly capture a researcher's preference to read papers which received a lot of attention recently. A detailed experimental evaluation on four real citation datasets across disciplines, shows that our approach is more effective than previous work in ranking papers based on their short-term impact.

As the number of published scientific papers continuously increases, the need to assess paper impact becomes more valuable than ever. In this work, we focus on citation-based measures that try to estimate the popularity (current impact) of an article. State-of-the-art methods in this category calculate estimates of popularity based on paper citation data. However, with respect to recent publications, only limited data of this type are available, rendering these measures prone to inaccuracies. In this work, we present ArtSim, an approach that exploits paper similarity, calculated using scholarly knowledge graphs, to better estimate paper popularity for recently published papers. Our approach is designed to be applied on top of existing popularity measures, to improve their accuracy. We apply ArtSim on top of four well-known popularity measures and demonstrate through experiments its potential in improving their popularity estimates.

Due to the rapidly increasing number of scientific articles, finding valuable work for further research has become tedious and time consuming. To alleviate this issue, search engines have used citation-based article impact ranking. However, most engines rely on very simplistic impact measures (usually the citation count) and make the problematic assumption that there is a one-size-fits-all impact measure. To address these problems, we present BIP! Finder, a search engine that facilitates the identification of valuable articles by exploiting two different impact measures, each capturing a different aspect of the article impact. In addition, BIP! Finder provides many useful features (article comparison, intuitive visualisations, article bookmarking mechanism, etc.) making it a powerful addition to the researcher's toolbox.

Monitoring trends in scientific disciplines is a common task forresearchers and other professionals in the broad research and academiccommunity, like research and innovation policy makers and research fundmanagers. We demonstrate SciTo, a powerful tool that assists in the monitoring oftrends in scientific disciplines. SciTo supports keyword-based search for the identification of scientific topics of interest and comparison ofinteresting topics to each other in terms of their popularity inside the academic community. Full author list: SerafeimChatzopoulos, PanagiotisDeligiannis, ThanasisVergoulis, IliasKanellos, ChristosTryfonopoulos, TheodoreDalamagas

Several works have used traditional readability measures to investigate the readability of scientific texts and its association with scientific impact . However, these works are limited in terms of dataset size, range of domains, and examined readability and impact measures. Our study addresses these limitations, investigating the readability of paper abstracts on a very large multidisciplinary corpus, the association of expert judgments on abstract readability with traditional readability measures, and the association of abstract readability with the scientific impact of the corresponding publication.

Summary: Identifying, amongst millions of publications available in MEDLINE, those that are relevant to specific microRNAs (miRNAs) of interest based on keyword search faces major obstacles. References to miRNA names in the literature often deviate from standard nomenclature for various reasons, since even the official nomenclature evolves. For instance, a single miRNA name may identify two completely different molecules or two different names may refer to the same molecule. mirPub is a database with a powerful and intuitive interface, which facilitates searching for miRNA literature, addressing the aforementioned issues. To provide effective search services, mirPub applies text mining techniques on MEDLINE, integrates data from several curated databases and exploits data from its user community following a crowdsourcing approach. Other key features include an interactive visualization service that illustrates intuitively the evolution of miRNA data, tag clouds summarizing the relevance of publications to particular diseases, cell types or tissues and access to TarBase 6.0 data to oversee genes related to miRNA publications. Availability and Implementation: mirPub is freely available at http://www.microrna.gr/mirpub/. Contact: vergoulis@imis.athena-innovation.gr or dalamag@imis.athena-innovation.gr Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small RNA molecules that target particular genes and prohibit their expression. Since many important diseases are related to the expression or non-expression of particular genes, knowing the miRNAs that affect these genes can help in finding possible treatments. In the last decade, a large amount of experimental studies trying to reveal the targets of several miRNAs has been published. A handful of curated databases that collect miRNA targets from the literature have been developed to make this information more easily available. However, due to the large number of existing published articles, maintaining these databases up-to-date is a tedious task that requires important resources. In this work we introduce TarMiner, a pipeline for automatic extraction of miRNA targets that can facilitate the curation process of databases that maintain miRNA validated targets.

In recent years, many articles studying microRNA (miRNA) molecules and their connection to diseases have been published. However, the wide range of literature in life sciences, raises a barrier in extracting useful information from them. MirPub is a search engine that resolves this issue, providing lists of articles related to particular miRNA terms and useful filters to customise them. In this work, we extend mirPub by utilising publication ranking methods to provide insights about the importance of each publication. Moreover, we automatically identify the species referred to in each publication to serve researchers studying particular species.