In this paper, we propose SimCS (similarity based on contribution scores) to compute the similarity of scientific papers. For similarity computation, we exploit a notion of a contribution score that indicates how much a paper contributes to another paper citing it. Also, we consider the author dominance of papers in computing contribution scores. We perform extensive experiments with a real-world dataset to show the superiority of SimCS. In comparison with SimCC, the-state-of-the-art method, SimCS not only requires no extra parameter tuning but also shows higher accuracy in similarity computation.