Scientific Research Paper Ranking Algorithm PTRA: A Tradeoff between Time and Citation Network

Most of the scientific research engines utilize the same way to rank scientific research papers (SRP), this way is highly depend on the citation network. The retrieved results of these engines for any keyword contain old papers with the highest citation value. In this paper, we proposed a new and easy to implement ranking algorithm for scientific research papers known as Paper Time Ranking Algorithm (PTRA). PTRA is a new ranking algorithm that depends on three factors to rank its results; paper age, citation index and publication venue. To construct and prove our ranking algorithm we created a web crawler that crawl different scientific search papers databases in the world to collect the information that PTRA needs. Unfortunately, some of this information was missing, such as, the impact factor of the journals. To collect this information, we created another crawler that search the Internet for these journals impact factors. However, to prove our ranking algorithm results, we have compared PTRA with Google scholar ranking algorithm. We used Google scholar, since it has more than 50 million papers and its own system can gather and collect papers in a faster way. Our comparison results show that, citation index has the highest impact on Google scholars ranking algorithm results. Unlike PTRA that gains the paper age a higher impact on the ranked results. However, PTRA depends on the citation index and publication venue to rank the results but with less impact than the paper age.