A hybrid approach for article recommendation in research social networks

With the prevalence of research social networks, determining effective methods for recommending scientific articles to online scholars has become a challenging and complex task. Current studies on article recommendation works are focused on digital libraries and reference sharing websites while studies on research social networking websites have seldom been conducted. Existing content-based approaches or collaborative filtering approaches suffer from the problem of data sparsity. The quality information of articles has been largely ignored in previous studies, thus raising the need for a unified recommendation framework. We propose a hybrid approach to combine relevance, connectivity and quality to recommend scientific articles. The effectiveness of the proposed framework and methods is verified using a user study on a real research social network website. The results demonstrate that our proposed methods outperform baseline methods.