Improving Community Detection in Academic Networks by Handling Publication Bias

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Noor, Md Asaduzzaman, Sheppard, John, Clark, Jason
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Noor, Md Asaduzzaman
Sheppard, John
Clark, Jason
author_facet Noor, Md Asaduzzaman
Sheppard, John
Clark, Jason
contents Finding potential research collaborators is a challenging task, especially in today's fast-growing and interdisciplinary research landscape. While traditional methods often rely on observable relationships such as co-authorships and citations to construct the research network, in this work, we focus solely on publication content to build a topic-based research network using BERTopic with a fine-tuned SciBERT model that connects and recommends researchers across disciplines based on shared topical interests. A major challenge we address is publication imbalance, where some researchers publish much more than others, often across several topics. Without careful handling, their less frequent interests are hidden under dominant topics, limiting the network's ability to detect their full research scope. To tackle this, we introduce a cloning strategy that clusters a researcher's publications and treats each cluster as a separate node. This allows researchers to be part of multiple communities, improving the detection of interdisciplinary links. Evaluation on the proposed method shows that the cloned network structure leads to more meaningful communities and uncovers a broader set of collaboration opportunities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_20449
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving Community Detection in Academic Networks by Handling Publication Bias
Noor, Md Asaduzzaman
Sheppard, John
Clark, Jason
Information Retrieval
Social and Information Networks
Finding potential research collaborators is a challenging task, especially in today's fast-growing and interdisciplinary research landscape. While traditional methods often rely on observable relationships such as co-authorships and citations to construct the research network, in this work, we focus solely on publication content to build a topic-based research network using BERTopic with a fine-tuned SciBERT model that connects and recommends researchers across disciplines based on shared topical interests. A major challenge we address is publication imbalance, where some researchers publish much more than others, often across several topics. Without careful handling, their less frequent interests are hidden under dominant topics, limiting the network's ability to detect their full research scope. To tackle this, we introduce a cloning strategy that clusters a researcher's publications and treats each cluster as a separate node. This allows researchers to be part of multiple communities, improving the detection of interdisciplinary links. Evaluation on the proposed method shows that the cloned network structure leads to more meaningful communities and uncovers a broader set of collaboration opportunities.
title Improving Community Detection in Academic Networks by Handling Publication Bias
topic Information Retrieval
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20449