A new perspective to automatically rank scientific conferences using digital libraries

Citation analysis is performed in order to evaluate authors and scientific collections, such as journals and conference proceedings. Currently, two major systems exist that perform citation analysis: Science Citation Index (SCI) by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and CiteSeer by the NEC Research Institute. The SCI, mostly a manual system up until recently, is based on the notion of the ISI Impact Factor, which has been used extensively for citation analysis purposes. On the other hand the CiteSeer system is an automatically built digital library using agents technology, also based on the notion of ISI Impact Factor. In this paper, we investigate new alternative notions besides the ISI impact factor, in order to provide a novel approach aiming at ranking scientific collections. Furthermore, we present a web-based system that has been built by extracting data from the Databases and Logic Programming (DBLP) website of the University of Trier. Our system, by using the new citation metrics, emerges as a useful tool for ranking scientific collections. In this respect, some first remarks are presented, e.g. on ranking conferences related to databases. 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.