Automated Research Article Classification and Recommendation Using NLP and Machine Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the digital era, the exponential growth of scientific publications has made it increasingly difficult for researchers to efficiently identify and access relevant work. This paper presents an automated framework for research article classification and recommendation that leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and machine learning. Using a large-scale arXiv.org dataset spanning more than three decades, we evaluate multiple feature extraction approaches (TF–IDF, Count Vectorizer, Sentence-BERT, USE, Mirror-BERT) in combination with diverse machine learning classifiers (Logistic Regression, SVM, Naïve Bayes, Random Forest, Gradient Boosted Trees, and k-Nearest Neighbor). Our experiments show that Logistic Regression with TF–IDF consistently yields the best classification performance, achieving an accuracy of 69%. To complement classification, we incorporate a recommendation module based on cosine similarity of vectorized articles, enabling efficient retrieval of related research papers. The proposed system directly addresses the challenge of information overload in digital libraries and demonstrates a scalable, data-driven solution to support literature discovery.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.020 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".