A multi-criteria ranking framework for partner selection in scientific collaboration environments

• A personalized time-aware partner authority model.
• A structural importance model and its application to scientific collaboration networks.
• Aggregation of ranking criteria using a systematic approach.

Scientific collaborations commonly take place in a global and competitive environment. Coalitions and project consortia are formed among universities, companies and research institutes to apply for research grants and to perform jointly collaborative projects. In such a competitive environment, individual institutes may be strategic partners or competitors. Measures to determine partner importance have practical applications such as comparison and rating of competitors, reputation evaluation or performance evaluation of companies and institutes. Many network-centric metrics exist to measure the importance of individuals or companies in social and collaborative networks. Here we present a novel approach for measuring and combing various criteria for partner importance evaluation. The presented approach is cost sensitive, aware of temporal and context-based partner authority, and takes structural information with regard to structural holes into account. Well-established graph models such as the notion of hubs and authorities provide the basis for the presented authority ranking approach and are systematically extended towards a novel unified HITS/PageRank model. The applicability of the proposed approach and the effects of parameter selection are extensively studied using real data from the European Union's research program.