Expert recommendation in social networks : Development and comparison of three approaches

Expert recommendation is an important aspect of effective collaboration in networked organizations. Existing expert recommendation methods mainly use topological measures to locate experts in a social network. However, individual user's perspective is largely ignored. In this paper, we develop a new mechanism for expert recommendation by utilizing both topological measures and social relationships among users and experts, thus improving the quality of expert recommendation. The effectiveness of the new method is evaluated and compared with existing methods. One research findings indicate that the new expert recommendation method is more effective.