On Constructing Seminal Paper Genealogy

Let us consider that someone is starting a research on a topic that is unfamiliar to them. Which seminal papers have influenced the topic the most? What is the genealogy of the seminal papers in this topic? These are the questions that they can raise, which we try to answer in this paper. First, we propose an algorithm that finds a set of seminal papers on a given topic. We also address the performance and scalability issues of this sophisticated algorithm. Next, we discuss the measures to decide how much a paper is influenced by another paper. Then, we propose an algorithm that constructs a genealogy of the seminal papers by using the influence measure and citation information. Finally, through extensive experiments with a large volume of a real-world academic literature data, we show the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.This work was supported in part by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology under Grant 2012R1A1A2007817, the Business for Cooperative Research and Development between Industry, Academy, and Research Institute funded the Korea Small and Medium Business Administration in 2012 under Grant C0006278, and the Ministry of Knowledge Economy, Korea and Microsoft Research, under the IT/SW Creative Research Program supervised by the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA) under Grant NIPA-2012-H0503-12-1018. This paper was recommended by Associate Editor J. Liu