Nowadays, scholar recommender systems often recommend academic papers based on users’ personalized retrieval demands. Typically, a recommender system analyzes the keywords typed by a user and then returns his or her preferred papers, in an efficient and economic manner. In practice, one paper often contains partial keywords that a user is interested in. Therefore, the recommender system needs to return the user a set of papers that collectively covers all the queried keywords. However, existing recommender systems only use the exact keyword matching technique for recommendation decisions, while neglecting the correlation relationships among different papers. As a consequence, it may output a set of papers from multiple disciplines that are different from the user’s real research field. In view of this shortcoming, we propose a keyword-driven and popularity-aware paper recommendation approach based on an undirected paper citation graph, named PRkeyword+pop. At last, we conduct large-scale experiments on the real-life Hep-Th dataset to further demonstrate the usefulness and feasibility of PRkeyword+pop. Experimental results prove the advantages of PRkeyword+pop in searching for a set of satisfactory papers compared with other competitive approaches.