Evaluating Score and Publication Similarity Functions in Digital Libraries

Digital libraries do not assign importance/relevance scores to their publications, authors, or publication venues, even though scores are potentially useful for (a) providing comparative assessment, or ”importances”, of publications, authors, publication venues, (b) ranking publications returned in search outputs, and (c) using scores in locating similar publications. Using social networks and bibliometrics, one can define several score functions. Existing publication similarity functions, used to locate similar papers to a particular paper, fall into two classes, namely, text-based similarity functions from Information Retrieval, and citation-based similarity functions based on bibliographic coupling and/or co-citation. In this study, we propose a number of publication, author, and publication venue score functions and publication similarity functions, which are then extended and evaluated in terms of accuracy, separability, and independence.