UCI ranks among Top 20 on Semantic Scholar Insights' List

UC Irvine has been ranked 17 out of 500 influential U.S. computer science schools on the newly generated Semantic Scholar Insights’ list.

The list, developed by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle uses machine learning techniques to measure the influence of computer science programs’ published papers throughout the country. It also ranks paper authors and institutions.

UC Irvine racks up nearly 8,900 highly influential citations, “where the cited publication has a significant impact on the citing publication, making it easier to understand how publications build upon and relate to each other,” according to Semantic Scholar. Using the Semantic Scholar algorithm, UC Irvine’s computer science influence beats out the likes of UCLA, Harvard and CalTech.

The insights list rivals Google Scholar, PubMed and other online search engines with artificial intelligence methods, though automatically inferring influence using quantitative methods can be tricky.

Influence is a difficult thing to measure, with the traditional method being counting citations. But, as a Science article observes, not all citations are created equal. Semantic Scholar attempts “a more direct measurement of a paper’s actual influence on future research,” the article says.

“Semantic Scholar tries to reveal what’s ‘hot’ in the field by measuring the ‘velocity’ and ‘acceleration’ of bodies of work, measurements of how rapidly others are citing certain work, and whether that is trending,” it adds.