Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2021

DOI

10.3389/frma.2020.600382

Publication Title

Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics

Volume

5

Pages

6003822 (1-12)

Abstract

Subject categories of scholarly papers generally refer to the knowledge domain(s) to which the papers belong, examples being computer science or physics. Subject category classification is a prerequisite for bibliometric studies, organizing scientific publications for domain knowledge extraction, and facilitating faceted searches for digital library search engines. Unfortunately, many academic papers do not have such information as part of their metadata. Most existing methods for solving this task focus on unsupervised learning that often relies on citation networks. However, a complete list of papers citing the current paper may not be readily available. In particular, new papers that have few or no citations cannot be classified using such methods. Here, we propose a deep attentive neural network (DANN) that classifies scholarly papers using only their abstracts. The network is trained using nine million abstracts from Web of Science (WoS). We also use the WoS schema that covers 104 subject categories. The proposed network consists of two bi-directional recurrent neural networks followed by an attention layer. We compare our model against baselines by varying the architecture and text representation. Our best model achieves micro- F1 measure of 0.76 with F1 of individual subject categories ranging from 0.50 to 0.95. The results showed the importance of retraining word embedding models to maximize the vocabulary overlap and the effectiveness of the attention mechanism. The combination of word vectors with TFIDF outperforms character and sentence level embedding models. We discuss imbalanced samples and overlapping categories and suggest possible strategies for mitigation. We also determine the subject category distribution in CiteSeerX by classifying a random sample of one million academic papers.

Comments

© 2021 Kandimalla, Rohatgi, Wu and Giles.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Original Publication Citation

Kandimalla, B., Rohatgi, S., Wu, J., & Giles, C. L. (2021). Large scale subject category classification of scholarly papers with deep attentive neural networks. Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics, 5, 1-12, Article 600382. https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2020.600382

ORCID

0000-0003-0173-4463 (Wu)

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