A qualitative study of large-scale recommendation algorithms for biomedical knowledge bases

The frequency at which new research documents are being published causes challenges for researchers who increasingly need access to relevant documents in order to conduct their research. Searching across a variety of databases and browsing millions of documents to find semantically relevant material is a time-consuming task. Recently, there has been a focus on recommendation algorithms that suggest relevant documents based on the current interests of the researchers. In this paper, we describe the implementation of seven commonly used algorithms and three aggregation algorithms. We evaluate the recommendation algorithms in a large-scale biomedical knowledge base with the goal of identifying relative weaknesses and strengths of each algorithm. We analyze the recommendations from each algorithm based on assessments of output as evaluated by 14 biomedical researchers. The results of our research provide unique insights into the performance of recommendation algorithms against the needs of modern-day biomedical researchers.