Utilizing Academic-Network-Based Conflict of Interests

Peer-review is the most common practice for accessing submitted papers. Previous research mainly focused on maximizing topic relevance and avoiding direct Conflict of Interest (COI) relationship between submitted authors of papers and reviewers. However potential relationships of Conflict of Interests were not considered which might cause unfair in reviewing process. Hence in this research an approach of paper-reviewer assignment was proposed considering potential Conflict of Interests between authors of submitted papers and reviewers. First academic networks of scholar-to-scholar and institution-to-institution were extracted from their academic activities records. Second potential conflict of interests of papers-reviewers were measured utilizing paths distance between related authors and reviewers on in academic networks topic relevance of papers-reviewers was measured using similarity between submitted papers content and publications of reviewers. Third the paper-reviewer assignment approach was linked to a minimum cost maximum flow problem which maximized topic relevance and minimized Conflict of Interests under the given constraints.