Exploiting user expertise and willingness of participation in building reputation model for scholarly community-based question and answering (CQA) platforms

Abstract

Several scholarly social networking platforms are available on the Web, which build a collaborative research & development (R&D) environment for academicians and researchers to connect and collaborate with each other in solving real-world problems. The collaboration happens in the form of uploading, sharing and following research outcomes including technical reports, research publications, books, etc.; giving feedback on these research outputs; and community-based question & answering (CQA). In such systems, the reputation of users plays a key role, which acts as a trust indicator for the quality of questions, answers, and in recommending scholars and scholarly data. It is therefore necessary to build the reputation of a scholar in manner that reflects their active participation in the CQA activities. Therefore, the paper contributes a reputation model that besides expertise, considers the willingness of the user to participate in the CQA activities. The proposed reputation model is the first step towards recommending experts and active scholars that can potentially answer a given question. The empirical results show that the user expertise and their willingness to participate in the scholarly social Q&A activities play a major role in building more accurate reputation.