Use of a Social Networking Recommendation Engine in Science and Engineering Education for Accessible Discovery, Organization and Collaboration of Research Knowledge

The World Wide Web is the primary tool used by researchers in the field of science and engineering to share knowledge. Whether students or researchers are trying to share their own discoveries or learn from the discoveries of others, they rely on the Internet as a resource where this information is gathered. The use of the Web for the exchange of scientific knowledge has to date remained very static. Websites such as Google Scholar [1] and PubMed [2] help students and researchers by indexing published journal articles based on research topic, content and keywords but are limited in that they lack the capability to suggest and rank articles in a useful manner to those new to the field. Simply put, there is no shortage of efficient search algorithms to find specific articles but these algorithms cannot help a student or new researcher that is not familiar with the research area or the search terms that should be used. Furthermore, when the student or researcher’s primary language is not English, the task of finding appropriate articles becomes significantly more challenging. Our objective is to create a recommendation engine to assist students and researchers with the discovery and organization of scientific and engineering knowledge and to present it in a manner that allows effective discussion to take place. In addition, such a recommendation engine should be capable of providing the user with an assessment of their contribution to the social network not only based on the number and quality of articles submitted but also the discussions that the user contributed to.