Abstract
Researchers often need to gather a comprehensive set of papers relevant to a focused topic, but this is often difficult and time-consuming using existing search methods. For example, keyword searching suffers from difficulties with synonyms and multiple meanings. While some automated research-paper recommender systems exist, these typically depend on either a researcher’s entire library or just a single paper, resulting in either a quite broad or a quite narrow search. With these issues in mind, we built a new research-paper recommender system that utilizes both citation information and textual similarity of abstracts to provide a highly focused set of relevant results. The input to this system is a set of one or more related papers, and our system searches for papers that are closely related to the entire set. This framework helps researchers gather a set of papers that are closely related to a particular topic of interest, and allows control over which cross-section of the literature is located. We show the effectiveness of this recommender system by using it to recreate the references of review papers. We also show its utility as a general similarity metric between scientific articles by performing unsupervised clustering on sets of scientific articles. We release an implementation, ExCiteSearch (bitbucket.org/mmmontemore/excitesearch), to allow researchers to apply this framework to locate relevant scientific articles.
Highlights
When pursuing a line of inquiry, assembling a comprehensive set of relevant knowledge from the scientific literature is a crucial first step
Probing through many journals is often prohibitive due to time constraints, causing researchers to turn to automated search methods
Traditional search methods return content that is similar to a handful of keywords, and many of the results may not be relevant
Summary
When pursuing a line of inquiry, assembling a comprehensive set of relevant knowledge from the scientific literature is a crucial first step. We describe and demonstrate the efficacy of ExCiteSearch, a research-paper recommender system that utilizes a user-determined combination of citation information and text similarity to find relevant papers.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have