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Research paper recommenders emerged over the last decade to ease finding publications relating to researchers’ area of interest. The challenge was not just to provide researchers with very rich publications at any time, any place and in any form but to also offer the right publication to the right researcher in the right way. Several approaches exist in handling paper recommender systems. However, these approaches assumed the availability of the whole contents of the recommending papers to be freely accessible, which is not always true due to factors such as copyright restrictions. This paper presents a collaborative approach for research paper recommender system. By leveraging the advantages of collaborative filtering approach, we utilize the publicly available contextual metadata to infer the hidden associations that exist between research papers in order to personalize recommendations. The novelty of our proposed approach is that it provides personalized recommendations regardless of the research field and regardless of the user’s expertise. Using a publicly available dataset, our proposed approach has recorded a significant improvement over other baseline methods in measuring both the overall performance and the ability to return relevant and useful publications at the top of the recommendation list. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific research is often thought of as being conducted by individuals and small teams striving for disciplinary advances. Yet as a whole, this endeavor more closely resembles a complex and integrated system of people, papers, and ideas. Studies of co-authorship and citation networks have revealed important structural properties of researchers and articles, but currently the structure of scientific ideas themselves is not well understood. In this study, we posit that topic networks may be a useful framework for revealing the nature of conceptual relationships. Using this framework, we map the landscape of interconnected research topics covered in the multidisciplinary journal PNAS since 2000, constructing networks in which nodes represent topics of study and edges give the extent to which topics occur in the same papers. The network displays small-world architecture, characterized by regions of dense local connectivity with sparse connectivity between them. In this network, dense local connectivity additionally gives rise to distinct clusters of related topics. Yet notably, these clusters tend not to align with assigned article classifications, and instead contain topics from various disciplines. Using a temporal graph, we find that small-worldness has increased over time, suggesting growing efficiency and integration of ideas. Finally, we define two measures of interdisciplinarity, one of which is found to be positively associated with PNAS’s impact factor. Broadly, this work suggests that complex and dynamic patterns of knowledge emerge from scientific research, and that structures reflecting intellectual integration may be beneficial for obtaining scientific insight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: As statisticians develop new methodological approaches, there are many factors that influence whether others will utilize their work. This paper is a bibliometric study that identifies and quantifies associations between characteristics of new biostatistics methods and their citation counts. Of primary interest was the association between numbers of citations and whether software code was available to the reader. Methods: Statistics journal articles published in 2010 from 35 statistical journals were reviewed by two biostatisticians. Generalized linear mixed models were used to determine which characteristics (author, article, and journal) were independently associated with citation counts (as of April 1, 2017) in other peer-reviewed articles. Results: Of 722 articles reviewed, 428 were classified as new biostatistics methods. In a multivariable model, for articles that were not freely accessible on the journal’s website, having code available appeared to offer no boost to the number of citations (adjusted rate ratio = 0.96, 95% CI = 0.74 to 1.24, p = 0.74); however, for articles that were freely accessible on the journal’s website, having code available was associated with a 2-fold increase in the number of citations (adjusted rate ratio = 2.01, 95% CI = 1.30 to 3.10, p = 0.002). Higher citation rates were also associated with higher numbers of references, longer articles, SCImago Journal Rank indicator (SJR), and total numbers of publications among authors, with the strongest impact on citation rates coming from SJR (rate ratio = 1.21 for a 1-unit increase in SJR; 95% CI = 1.11 to 1.32). Conclusion: These analyses shed new insight into factors associated with citation rates of articles on new biostatistical methods. Making computer code available to readers is a goal worth striving for that may enhance biostatistics knowledge translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use citation data of scientific articles produced by individual nations in different scientific domains to determine the structure and efficiency of national research systems. We characterize the scientific fitness of each nation—that is, the competitiveness of its research system—and the complexity of each scientific domain by means of a non-linear iterative algorithm able to assess quantitatively the advantage of scientific diversification. We find that technological leading nations, beyond having the largest production of scientific papers and the largest number of citations, do not specialize in a few scientific domains. Rather, they diversify as much as possible their research system. On the other side, less developed nations are competitive only in scientific domains where also many other nations are present. Diversification thus represents the key element that correlates with scientific and technological competitiveness. A remarkable implication of this structure of the scientific competition is that the scientific domains playing the role of “markers” of national scientific competitiveness are those not necessarily of high technological requirements, but rather addressing the most “sophisticated” needs of the society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the high cost of the research assessment exercises in the UK, many have called for simpler and less time-consuming alternatives. In this work, we gathered publicly available REF data, combined them with library-subscribed data, and used machine learning to examine whether the overall result of the Research Excellence Framework 2014 could be replicated. A Bayesian additive regression tree model predicting university grade point average (GPA) from an initial set of 18 candidate explanatory variables was developed. One hundred and nine universities were randomly divided into a training set (n = 79) and test set (n = 30). The model “learned” associations between GPA and the other variables in the training set and was made to predict the GPA of universities in the test set. GPA could be predicted from just three variables: the number of Web of Science documents, entry tariff, and percentage of students coming from state schools (r-squared = .88). Implications of this finding are discussed and proposals are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Systems biology is a discipline that studies biological systems from a holistic and interdisciplinary perspective. It brings together biologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, and engineers, so it has both biology-oriented components and systems-oriented components. We applied several computational tools to analyze the bibliographic information of published articles in systems biology to answer the question: Did the research topics of systems biology become more biology-oriented or more systems-oriented from 1992 to 2013? We analyzed the metadata of 9923 articles on systems biology from the Web of Science database. We identified the most highly cited 330 references using computational tools and through close reading we divided them into nine categories of research types in systems biology. Interestingly, we found that articles in one category, namely, systems biology’s applications in medical research, increased tremendously. This finding was corroborated by computational analysis of the abstracts, which also suggested that the percentages of topics on vaccines, diseases, drugs and cancers increased over time. In addition, we analyzed the institutional backgrounds of the corresponding authors of those 9923 articles and identified the most highly cited 330 authors over time. We found that before the mid-1990s, systems-oriented scientists had made the most referenced contributions. However, in recent years, researchers from biology-oriented institutions not only represented a huge percentage of the total number of researchers, but also had made the most referenced contributions. Notably, interdisciplinary institutions only produced a small percentage of researchers, but had made disproportionate contributions to this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]