Sorting Papers by Keywords

Imagine you are a given an inhumanely big electronic pile of publications to read and an early deadline. Even reading the abstracts will cost you a considerable amount of your time and most of the papers are not all related to what you are up to. How do you select the papers to read first?

A simple approach might be the following: Assume you can come up with a set of keywords with an accompanying quality factor.The quality factor indicates how much you are interested in a given keyword. A very important keyword might be given a quality factor of 1.0 and a more general keyword might have a quality factor of just 0.1.

With this set of keywords and quality factors it is quite easy to compute a score for every publication. For every paper and every keyword the number of occurrence of the keyword is counted and the score of the document is increased according to the quality factor. The papers can be sorted by score and this gives you the priorities in which to read the papers. While this may not be a masterpiece of Information Retrieval, it is still a simple and quick approach to find relevant information.

A simple R script to create a table with paper scores can be downloaded here. The text mining package tm is used, which reads .pdf files conveniently.
The keywords/quality factor pairs need to be provided in an extra file just like the paths to the publications. The script creates a simple .html file for convenient viewing of the scored paper list.