Abstract: From the perspective of hypernetwork, the paper studies the importance of authors in scientific research collaboration. First of all, by considering the impact factors of journals, time factors and cited frequency of papers, authors’ signature order and the paper quantity, we design author’s own scientific value V, which can characterize the local importance of authors. Then, we construct the average path matrix with arbitrary length. According to the distance between nodes, the average number of paths and other factors, three matrices about importance contribution proportion are constructed, which reflect the influence strength among all nodes. As a result, we obtain the total importance contribution value F that can characterize the global importance of authors. Finally, combined with the author’s own value V and the contribution value F obtained from other authors, the final importance index D is proposed. In the field of library and information, we construct the hypernetwork including 81 authors and 855 papers. The empirical results show that the index proposed can identify the core authors effectively. Moreover, compared with traditional and single indicators respectively, the validity of the method is further verified.

Key words: Hyper network, Importance of authors, Importance contribution matrix, Average number of paths, Composite cited frequency.