Identifying relevant researchers in academic genealogical graphs: a PageRank-based approach

• Grant number: 17/15129-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: October 01, 2017
• End date: September 30, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science - Computing Methodologies and Techniques
• Principal Investigator: Jesús Pascual Mena Chalco
• Grantee: Arthur Veloso Kamienski
• Host Institution: Centro de Matemática, Computação e Cognição (CMCC). Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC). Ministério da Educação (Brasil). Santo André , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Identifying relevant researchers on their fields of research is a difficult task, despite being of great relevance. The analysis involves different indicators not only in science, but also in the social and political scenarios. Nowadays, there are multiple quantitative and qualitative methods to evaluate researchers on the different contexts in which they are located. On the quantitative methods, the greatest difficulty in associating these indicators is the evaluation of the impact of each researcher not only on the totality of the community that they belong to, but also on the local structure that surrounds them. In this research project we make use of the PageRank algorithm on an academic genealogical graph to analyze the relevance of each member that composes it. Additionally, we plan to modify this algorithm in order to obtain a local information (instead of a global one), in a way that finds the most important researchers with a higher reliability. The contribution of this project, in addition to identifying important researchers from the human resources perspective, will allow the creation of new methods and metrics capable of assist future studies about the academic genealogy theme. (AU)