Understanding Factors Influencing the Citation Count of Networking Conference Papers

The impact of a journal on its community is usually judged based on its impact factor. Researchers often aim to publish their research findings at journals with high impact factors. Conversely, researchers tend to judge the quality of a conference based on its acceptance rate. However, it remains unknown if the low acceptance rate of a conference reflects a high impact on its community compared to a conference with high acceptance rate. We performed an empirical study to analyze the influence of conference rankings on the number of citations a paper may receive over time. Our results show that papers published at highly reputed conferences tend to have a higher number of citations on average, than low ranked conferences. Additionally, we found that the title of the paper also influences the citation count. We believe our work would bring forth the opportunities for authors of working papers to increase the number of citations of their papers as well increase the impact of their research towards the growth of their respective communities. keywords: Citation count, conference rankings, paper title, publication year, impact factor.