Abstract

The application of kernel methods to citation analysis is explored. We show that a family of kernels on graphs provides a unified perspective on the three bibliometric measures that have been discussed independently: relatedness between documents, global importance of individual documents, and importance of documents relative to one or more documents. The framework provided by the kernels establishes relative importance as an intermediate between relatedness and global importance, in which the degree of `relativity,' or the bias between relatedness and importance, is naturally controlled by a parameter characterizing individual kernels in the family.