Finding potential research collaborators in four degrees of separation

Abstract

This paper proposed a methodology for finding the potential research collaborators based on structural approach underlying co-authorship network and semantic approach extends from author-topic model. We proposed the valuable features for identifying the closeness between researchers in co-authorship network. We also proved that using the combination between structural approach and semantic approach is work well. Our methodology able to suggest the researchers who appear within the four degrees of separation from the specific researcher who have never collaborated together in the past periods. The experimental results are discussed in the various aspects, for instance, top-n retrieved researchers and researcher's community. The results show that our proposed idea is the applicable method used for collaborator suggestion task. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.