Searching and ranking researchers by keywords based on author and paper matrix rank

A novice researcher conducting research in a new field, must identify that the preeminent researchers in that field in order to obtain influential papers to refer to. Although some Internet services allow users to search for researchers, these services do not take coauthors and related papers into consideration. In this paper, we propose a new researcher search-and-ranking method that is based on a new matrix called the Author and Paper Matrix (APM). The APM allows coauthor and related-paper references to be embedded as the weight of an APM element. A preliminary evaluation of APM demonstrates that it can help to identify appropriate and influential researchers within a given field.