Patent Document ID: 7529735
Application ID: 11057100

Base Claim:
1. A computer-implemented method for a computer to identify authors that have a relationship, the method comprising: providing an indication of authors of papers; identifying clusters of authors based on co-author relationships between the authors wherein authors within a same cluster have a relationship; storing in a memory of the computer an indication of the identified clusters of authors; and calculating an importance of authors within an author cluster wherein the importance of an author is defined recursively based on the importance of the papers authored by the author and wherein the importance of an author and a paper is defined as follows: 
 R author =W diag( R paper N T paper ) 
 R paper =W T diag( R author N T author ) where R author is a vector of the importance (or ranking) of the authors, R paper is a vector of the importance (or ranking) of the papers, W is an adjacency matrix mapping authors to papers, W T is a transpose of the adjacency matrix W, N T paper is a matrix of normalization terms for the papers, and N T author is a matrix of normalization terms for the authors.

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Claim 2:
2. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 wherein the identifying of author clusters includes: generating a publication vector for each author, a publication vector identifying papers authored by the author; and clustering the authors based on distance between the publication vectors.