A Web mining approach for finding expertise in research areas

Finding expertise in a research area helps researchers to know whom are the experts working on the research area. This paper proposes a web mining approach for finding expertise in scientific research areas. In this approach, Indexing Agents search and download scientific publications from web sites that typically include academic web pages, then they extract citations and store them in a Web Citation Database. In addition, researcher information is also saved into the Researcher Database. Data mining techniques are applied to the Web Citation Database on citation keywords and authors to form document clusters and author clusters. The Multi-Clustering technique is proposed to mine the combined information of document clusters and author clusters for information on expertise in specified research areas.