SciImpact: A Multi-Dimensional, Multi-Field Benchmark for Scientific Impact Prediction

Hangxiao Zhu, Yuyu Zhang, Ping Nie, Yu Zhang


Abstract
The rapid growth of scientific literature calls for automated methods to assess and predict research impact.Prior work has largely focused on citation-based metrics, leaving limited evaluation of models’ capability to reason about other impact dimensions.To this end, we introduce SciImpact, a large-scale, multi-dimensional benchmark for scientific impact prediction spanning 19 fields.SciImpact captures various forms of scientific influence, ranging from citation counts to award recognition, media attention, patent reference, and artifact adoption, by integrating heterogeneous data sources and targeted web crawling.It comprises 215,928 contrastive paper pairs reflecting meaningful impact differences in both short- (e.g., Best Paper Award) and long-term settings (e.g., Nobel Prize).We evaluate 11 widely used large language models (LLMs) on SciImpact.Results show that off-the-shelf models show substantial variability across dimensions and fields, while multi-task supervised fine-tuning consistently enables smaller LLMs (e.g., 4B) to markedly outperform much larger models (e.g., 30B) and surpass powerful closed-source LLMs (e.g., o4-mini).These results establish SciImpact as a challenging benchmark and demonstrate its value for multi-dimensional, multi-field scientific impact prediction.Our project homepage is https://flypig23.github.io/sciimpact-homepage/.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.1445
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
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Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
28923–28936
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1445/
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Cite (ACL):
Hangxiao Zhu, Yuyu Zhang, Ping Nie, and Yu Zhang. 2026. SciImpact: A Multi-Dimensional, Multi-Field Benchmark for Scientific Impact Prediction. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 28923–28936, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SciImpact: A Multi-Dimensional, Multi-Field Benchmark for Scientific Impact Prediction (Zhu et al., Findings 2026)
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