An Interactive Scholarly Collaborative Network Based on Academic Relationships and Research Collaborations

Abstract

In this era of digital transformation, when the amount of scholarly literature is rapidly growing, hundreds of papers are published online daily with regard to different fields, especially in relation to academic subjects. Therefore, it difficult to find an expert/author to collaborate with from a specific research area. This is thought to be one of the most challenging activities in academia, and few people have considered authors’ multi-factors as an enhanced method to find potential collaborators or to identify the expert among them; consequently, this research aims to propose a novel model to improve the process of recommending authors. This is based on the authors’ similarity measurements by extracting their explicit and implicit topics of interest from their academic literature. The proposed model mainly consists of three factors: author-selected keywords, the extraction of a topic’s distribution from their publications, and their publication-based statistics. Furthermore, an enhanced approach for identifying expert authors by extracting evidence of expertise has been proposed based on the topic-modeling principle. Subsequently, an interactive network has been constructed that represents the predicted authors’ collaborative relationship, including the top-k potential collaborators for each individual. Three experiments have been conducted on the collected data; they demonstrated that the most influential factor for accurately recommending a collaborator was the topic’s distribution, which had an accuracy rate of 88.4%. Future work could involve building a heterogeneous co-collaboration network that includes both the authors with their affiliations and computing their similarities. In addition, the recommendations would be improved if potential and real collaborations were combined in a single network.