Scientific recommendations to enhance scholarly awareness and foster collaboration

Abstract

Recommender systems have become an essential part of the web user’s life. Whether it is recommended books or movies, friends on social networks or mobile phone contracts, service providers have realized that personalized recommendations and ads increase customer retention and satisfaction. Last but not lease, recommender systems can help selling more goods. Scientifi c recommender systems, on the other hand, have the goal to recommend useful scholarly objects such as publications, conferences or researchers to the interested researcher in order to make them aware of them and to foster collaboration and scientifi c exchange. In this paper we introduce PUSHPIN, a social network for researchers and its recommender approach. PUSHPIN is based on an eResearch infrastructure that analyzes large corpora of scientifi c publications and combines the extracted data with the social interactions in an active social network.