Publications Database

Welcome to the new Schulich Peer-Reviewed Publication Database!

The database is currently in beta-testing and will be updated with more features as time goes on. In the meantime, stakeholders are free to explore our faculty’s numerous works. The left-hand panel affords the ability to search by the following:

  • Faculty Member’s Name;
  • Area of Expertise;
  • Whether the Publication is Open-Access (free for public download);
  • Journal Name; and
  • Date Range.

At present, the database covers publications from 2012 to 2020, but will extend further back in the future. In addition to listing publications, the database includes two types of impact metrics: Altmetrics and Plum. The database will be updated annually with most recent publications from our faculty.

If you have any questions or input, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

 

Search Results

Bai, X., Fang, X., Li, Z. and Sheng, O. (2017). "Utility-Based Link Recommendation for Online Social Networks", Management Science, 63(6), 1938-1952.

Open Access Download

Keywords
Abstract Link recommendation, which suggests links to connect currently unlinked users, is a key functionality offered by major online social networks. Salient examples of link recommendation include “People You May Know” on Facebook and LinkedIn as well as “You May Know” on Google+. The main stakeholders of an online social network include users (e.g., Facebook users) who use the network to socialize with other users and an operator (e.g., Facebook Inc.) that establishes and operates the network for its own benefit (e.g., revenue). Existing link recommendation methods recommend links that are likely to be established by users but overlook the benefit a recommended link could bring to an operator. To address this gap, we define the utility of recommending a link and formulate a new research problem—the utility-based link recommendation problem. We then propose a novel utility-based link recommendation method that recommends links based on the value, cost, and linkage likelihood of a link, in contrast to existing link recommendation methods that focus solely on linkage likelihood. Specifically, our method models the dependency relationship between the value, cost, linkage likelihood, and utility-based link recommendation decision using a Bayesian network; predicts the probability of recommending a link with the Bayesian network; and recommends links with the highest probabilities. Using data obtained from a major U.S. online social network, we demonstrate significant performance improvement achieved by our method compared with prevalent link recommendation methods from representative prior research.

Fang, X., Hu, P., Li, Z. and Tsai, W. (2013). "Predicting Adoption Probabilities in Social Networks", Information Systems Research, 24(1).

Open Access Download

Keywords
Abstract In a social network, adoption probability refers to the probability that a social entity will adopt a product, service, or opinion in the foreseeable future. Such probabilities are central to fundamental issues in social network analysis, including the influence maximization problem. In practice, adoption probabilities have significant implications for applications ranging from social network-based target marketing to political campaigns; yet, predicting adoption probabilities has not received sufficient research attention. Building on relevant social network theories, we identify and operationalize key factors that affect adoption decisions: social influence, structural equivalence, entity similarity, and confounding factors. We then develop the locally-weighted expectation-maximization method for Naïve Bayesian learning to predict adoption probabilities on the basis of these factors. The principal challenge addressed in this study is how to predict adoption probabilities in the presence of confounding factors that are generally unobserved. Using data from two large-scale social networks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The empirical results also suggest that cascade methods primarily using social influence to predict adoption probabilities offer limited predictive power, and that confounding factors are critical to adoption probability predictions.