Identifying the rising stars is an important but difficult human resource exercise in all organizations. Rising stars are those who currently have relatively low profiles but may eventually emerge as prominent contributors to the organizations. In this paper, we propose a novel PubRank algorithm to identify rising stars in research communities by mining the social networks of researchers in terms of their co-authorship relationships. Experimental results show that PubRank algorithm can be used to effectively mine the bibliography networks to search for rising stars in the research communities.