Finding relevant papers based on citation relations

With the tremendous amount of research publications, recommending relevant papers to researchers to fulfill their information need becomes a significant problem. The major challenge to be tackled by our work is that given a target paper, how to effectively recommend a set of relevant papers from an existing citation network. In this paper, we propose a novel method to address the problem by incorporating various citation relations for a proper set of papers, which are more relevant but with a very limited size. The proposed method has two unique properties. Firstly, a metric called Local Relation Strength is defined to measure the dependency between cited and citing papers. Secondly, a model called Global Relation Strength is proposed to capture the relevance between two papers in the whole citation graph. We evaluate our proposed model on a real-world publication dataset and conduct an extensive comparison with the state-of-the-art baseline methods. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can have a promising improvement over the state-of-the-art techniques. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.