A comprehensive evaluation of scholarly paper recommendation using potential citation papers

To help generate relevant suggestions for researchers, recommendation systems have started to leverage the latent interests in the publication profiles of the researchers themselves. While using such a publication citation network has been shown to enhance performance, the network is often sparse, making recommendation difficult. To alleviate this sparsity, in our former work, we identified “potential citation papers” through the use of collaborative filtering. Also, as different logical sections of a paper have different significance, as a secondary contribution, we investigated which sections of papers can be leveraged to represent papers effectively. While this initial approach works well for researchers vested in a single discipline, it generates poor predictions for scientists who work on several different topics in the discipline (hereafter, “intra-disciplinary”). We thus extend our previous work in this paper by proposing an adaptive neighbor selection method to overcome this problem in our imputation-based collaborative filtering framework. On a publicly-available scholarly paper recommendation dataset, we show that recommendation accuracy significantly outperforms state-of-the-art recommendation baselines as measured by nDCG and MRR, when using our adaptive neighbor selection method. While recommendation performance is enhanced for all researchers, improvements are more marked for intra-disciplinary researchers, showing that our method does address the targeted audience.