A social model for literature access: towards a weighted social network of authors

This paper presents a novel retrieval approach for literature access based on social network analysis. In fact, we investigate a social model where authors represent the main entities and relationships are extracted from co-author and citation links. Moreover, we define a weighting model for social relationships which takes into account the authors positions in the social network and their mutual collaborations. Assigned weights express influence, knowledge transfer and shared interest between authors. Furthermore, we estimate document relevance by combing the document-query similarity and the document social importance derived from corresponding authors. To evaluate the effectiveness of our model, we conduct a series of experiments on a scientific document dataset that includes textual content and social data extracted from the academic social network CiteULike. Final results show that the proposed model improves the retrieval effectiveness and outperforms traditional and social information retrieval baselines.