Vol.:(0123456789) Scientometrics https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03642-y 1 3 Research paper recommender system based on public contextual metadata Khalid Haruna 1  · Maizatul Akmar Ismail 2  · Atika Qazi 3  · Habeebah Adamu Kakudi 1  · Mohammed Hassan 4  · Sanah Abdullahi Muaz 4  · Haruna Chiroma 5 Received: 11 September 2019 © Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2020 Abstract Due to the exponential increase in research papers on a daily basis, fnding and access- ing related academic documents over the Internet is monotonous. One of the leading approaches was the use of recommendation systems to proactively recommend scholarly papers to individual researchers. The primary drawback to these methods, however, is that their success depends on user profle information and is therefore unable to provide useful suggestions to the new user. In addition, both the public and the non-public used descrip- tive metadata are used. The scope of the recommendation is therefore limited to a number of documents which are either publicly available or which are granted copyright permits. In alleviating the above problems, we proposed an alternative approach using public con- textual metadata for an independent framework that customizes scholarly papers, regard- less of the research feld and user expertise. Experimental tests have shown signifcant improvements over other baseline methods. Keywords Research paper recommendation framework · Paper-citation relations · Priori user profle · Public contextual metadata * Khalid Haruna kharuna.cs@buk.edu.ng * Maizatul Akmar Ismail maizatul@um.edu.my * Haruna Chiroma freedonchi@yahoo.com 1 Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria 2 Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 3 Centre for Lifelong Learning, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Gadong BE1410, Brunei 4 Department of Software Engineering, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria 5 Future Technology Research Center, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Douliu, Yunlin, Taiwan