BIP! Finder (
bip.imsi.athenarc.gr) is a tool that
assists the discovery of valuable publications. This tool supports ranking and comparing of scientific articles
based on their popularity (short-term impact) or influence (long-term impact), while it provides useful features like intuitive infographics for each article and a mechanism of bookmarks.
Measuring impact of a scientific article is not a trivial task, and we may easily stumble into pitfalls along the way. It is an oversimplification to assume that there is a single, one-size-fits-all publication impact measure. In fact, such an impact may have several aspects that should be captured and understood in many different ways.
For example, a researcher often needs to search for the most “popular” articles in a field, i.e., those which are currently the focal point of the scientific community. On the other hand, a researcher may be interested in collecting “influential” papers for a field, i.e., those which have strongly shaped the field. Each of those impact aspects of a paper, i.e., popularity and influence, can be estimated by performing a different type of link analysis on the underlying citation network.
In BIP! Finder, influence is calculated using PageRank while popularity is calculated by executing TAR-RAM on the citation network.