The diversity of bibliometric indices today poses the challenge of exploiting the relationships among them. Our research uncovers the best core set of relevant indices for predicting other bibliometric indices. An added difficulty is to select the role of each variable, that is, which bibliometric indices are predictive variables and which are response variables. This results in a novel multioutput regression problem where the role of each variable (predictor or response) is unknown beforehand. We use Gaussian Bayesian networks to solve the this problem and discover multivariate relationships among bibliometric indices. These networks are learnt by a genetic algorithm that looks for the optimal models that best predict bibliometric data. Results show that the optimal induced Gaussian Bayesian networks corroborate previous relationships between several indices, but also suggest new, previously unreported interactions. An extended analysis of the best model illustrates that a set of 12 bibliometric indices can be accurately predicted using only a smaller predictive core subset composed of citations, g‐index, q2‐index, and hr‐index. This research is performed using bibliometric data on Spanish full professors associated with the computer science area.

Bibliometric indices are an increasingly important topic for the scientific community nowadays. One of the most successful bibliometric indices is the well-known h-index. In view of the attention attracted by this index, our research is based on the construction of several prediction models to forecast the h-index of Spanish professors (with a permanent position) for a four-year time horizon. We built two different types of models (junior models and senior models) to differentiate between professors' seniority. These models are learnt from bibliometric data using a cost-sensitive naive Bayes approach that takes into account the expected cost of instances predictions at classification time. Results show that it is easier to predict the h-index of the one-year time horizon than the others, that is, it has a higher average accuracy and lower average total cost than the others. Similarly, it is easier to predict the h-index of junior professors than senior professors.

MOTIVATION: Nowadays, publishers of scientific journals face the tough task of selecting high-quality articles that will attract as many readers as possible from a pool of articles. This is due to the growth of scientific output and literature. The possibility of a journal having a tool capable of predicting the citation count of an article within the first few years after publication would pave the way for new assessment systems. RESULTS: This article presents a new approach based on building several prediction models for the Bioinformatics journal. These models predict the citation count of an article within 4 years after publication (global models). To build these models, tokens found in the abstracts of Bioinformatics papers have been used as predictive features, along with other features like the journal sections and 2-week post-publication periods. To improve the accuracy of the global models, specific models have been built for each Bioinformatics journal section (Data and Text Mining, Databases and Ontologies, Gene Expression, Genetics and Population Analysis, Genome Analysis, Phylogenetics, Sequence Analysis, Structural Bioinformatics and Systems Biology). In these new models, the average success rate for predictions using the naive Bayes and logistic regression supervised classification methods was 89.4% and 91.5%, respectively, within the nine sections and for 4-year time horizon. AVAILABILITY: Supplementary material on this experimental survey is available at http://www.dia.fi.upm.es/~concha/bioinformatics.html CONTACT: [email protected]