A pragmatic approach to hierarchical categorization of research expertise in the presence of scarce information

Throughout the history of science, different knowledge areas have collaborated to overcome major research challenges. The task of associating a researcher with such areas makes a series of tasks feasible such as the organization of digital repositories, expertise recommendation and the formation of research groups for complex problems. In this article, we propose a simple yet effective automatic classification model that is capable of categorizing research expertise according to a knowledge area classification scheme. Our proposal relies on discriminatory evidence provided by the title of academic works, which is the minimum information capable of relating a researcher to its knowledge area. Our experiments show that using supervised machine learning methods trained with manually labeled information, it is possible to produce effective classification models.