Title: Understanding the Impact of Early Citers on Long-Term Scientific Impact,
Abstract: This paper explores an interesting new dimension to the challenging problem
of predicting long-term scientific impact (LTSI) usually measured by the number
of citations accumulated by a paper in the long-term. It is well known that
early citations (within 1-2 years after publication) acquired by a paper
positively affects its LTSI. However, there is no work that investigates if the
set of authors who bring in these early citations to a paper also affect its
LTSI. In this paper, we demonstrate for the first time, the impact of these
authors whom we call early citers (EC) on the LTSI of a paper. Note that this
study of the complex dynamics of EC introduces a brand new paradigm in citation
behavior analysis. Using a massive computer science bibliographic dataset we
identify two distinct categories of EC - we call those authors who have high
overall publication/citation count in the dataset as influential and the rest
of the authors as non-influential. We investigate three characteristic
properties of EC and present an extensive analysis of how each category
correlates with LTSI in terms of these properties. In contrast to popular
perception, we find that influential EC negatively affects LTSI possibly owing
to attention stealing. To motivate this, we present several representative
examples from the dataset. A closer inspection of the collaboration network
reveals that this stealing effect is more profound if an EC is nearer to the
authors of the paper being investigated. As an intuitive use case, we show that
incorporating EC properties in the state-of-the-art supervised citation
prediction models leads to high performance margins. At the closing, we present
an online portal to visualize EC statistics along with the prediction results
for a given query paper.