Researchers spend considerable time searching for relevant papers on the topic in which they are currently interested. Often, despite having similar interests, researchers in the same lab do not find it convenient to share results of bibliographic searches and thus conduct independent time-consuming searches. Research paper recommender systems can help the researcher avoid such time-consuming searches by allowing each researcher to automatically take advantage of previous searches performed by others in the lab. Existing recommender systems were developed for commercial domains to assist users by focussing towards products of their interests. Unlike those domains, the research paper domain has relatively few users when compared with the huge number of research papers. In this paper we present a novel system to recommend relevant research papers to a user based on the user's recent querying and browsing habits. The core of the system is a scalable subspace clustering algorithm (SCuBA 1 ) that performs well on the sparse, high-dimensional data collected in this domain. Both synthetic and benchmark datasets are used to evaluate the recommendation system and to demonstrate that it performs better than the traditional collaborative filtering approaches when recommending research papers.
Background and MotivationThe explosive growth of the world-wide web and the emerging popularity of e-commerce has caused the collection of data to outpace the analysis necessary to extract useful information. Recommender systems were developed to help close the gap between information collection and analysis by filtering all of the available information to present what is most valuable to the user (Resnick and Varian, 1997).One area of the web that has seen continued growth is the online publication of research papers. The number of research papers published continues to increase, and new technology has allowed many older papers to be rapidly digitized. A typical researcher must sift through a large quantity of articles manually, relying on keyword-based searches or paper citations to guide them. The search results of researchers with similar interests can help direct a more effective search, but the process of sharing search results is often too We assume that the proposed system is localized for a typical lab setting which augments an existing search engine. Rather than performing search in some digital library, SCuBA tries to leverage the existing search results. It tries to find similar interest groups of users based on their browsing patterns and recommends research papers which might be interesting to them.There are two main branches of recommender systems; content based filtering and collaborative filtering.Content based filtering (CBF) approaches create relationships between items by analyzing inherent charac-