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Rapid increase in scholarly publications on the web has posed a new challenge to the researchers in finding highly relevant and important research articles associated with a particular area of interest. Even a highly relevant paper is sometimes missed especially for novice researchers due to lack of knowledge and experience in finding and accessing the most suitable articles. Scholarly recommender system is a very appropriate tool for this purpose that can enable researchers to locate relevant publications easily and quickly. However, the main downside of the existing approaches is that their effectiveness is dependent on priori user profiles and thus, they cannot recommend papers to the new users. Furthermore, the system uses both public and non-public metadata and therefore, the system is unable to find similarities between papers efficiently due to copyright restrictions. Considering the above challenges, in this research work, a novel hybrid approach is proposed that separately combines a Content Based Filtering (CBF) recommender module and a Collaborative Filtering (CF) recommender module. Unlike previous CBF and CF approaches, public contextual metadata and paper-citation relationship information are effectively incorporated into these two approaches separately to enhance the recommendation accuracy. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, publicly available datasets were employed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the baseline approaches in terms of standard metrics (precision, recall, F1-measure, mean average precision, and mean reciprocal rank), indicating that the proposed approach is more efficient in recommending scholarly publications.

Globally, the recommendation services have become important due to the fact that they support e-commerce applications and different research communities. Recommender systems have a large number of applications in many fields, including economic, education, and scientific research. Different empirical studies have shown that the recommender systems are more effective and reliable than the keyword-based search engines for extracting useful knowledge from massive amounts of data. The problem of recommending similar scientific articles in scientific community is called scientific paper recommendation. Scientific paper recommendation aims to recommend new articles or classical articles that match researchers' interests. It has become an attractive area of study since the number of scholarly papers increases exponentially. In this paper, we first introduce the importance and advantages of the paper recommender systems. Second, we review the recommendation algorithms and methods, such as Content-based, collaborative filtering, graph-based, and hybrid methods. Then, we introduce the evaluation methods of different recommender systems. Finally, we summarize the open issues in the paper recommender systems, including cold start, sparsity, scalability, privacy, serendipity, and unified scholarly data standards. The purpose of this survey is to provide comprehensive reviews on the scholarly paper recommendation.