Leveraging the citation graph to recommend keywords

Users of scientific papers databases, such as CiteSeer^X, Google Scholar, and Microsoft Academic, often search for papers using a set of keywords. Unfortunately, many authors avoid listing sufficient keywords for their papers. As such, these applications may need to automatically associate good descriptive keywords with papers. This is a well-studied problem given the complete text of the paper, but in many cases, due to copyright privileges, research papers databases do not have the complete text, only metadata, such as the title and abstract. On the other hand, research papers databases typically maintain the citation network of each paper. In this paper we study the problem of predicting which keywords are appropriate for a scientific paper, using only the citation network. We compare our method with predicting keywords using the title and abstract, concluding that the citation network provides much better predictions.