Stepping beyond your comfort zone: Diffusion‐based network analytics for knowledge trajectory recommendation

Predicting a researcher's knowledge trajectories beyond their current foci can leverage potential inter‐/cross‐/multi‐disciplinary interactions to achieve exploratory innovation. In this study, we present a method of diffusion‐based network analytics for knowledge trajectory recommendation. The method begins by constructing a heterogeneous bibliometric network consisting of a co‐topic layer and a co‐authorship layer. A novel link prediction approach with a diffusion strategy is then used to capture the interactions between social elements (e.g., collaboration) and knowledge elements (e.g., technological similarity) in the process of exploratory innovation. This diffusion strategy differentiates the interactions occurring among homogeneous and heterogeneous nodes in the heterogeneous bibliometric network and weights the strengths of these interactions. Two sets of experiments—one with a local dataset and the other with a global dataset—demonstrate that the proposed method is prior to 10 selected baselines in link prediction, recommender systems, and upstream graph representation learning. A case study recommending knowledge trajectories of information scientists with topical hierarchy and explainable mediators reveals the proposed method's reliability and potential practical uses in broad scenarios.