# Bursting Scientific Filter Bubbles: Boosting Innovation via Novel Author Discovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.05669 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05669/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10964/) (2020)
- [SPECTER: Document-level Representation Learning using Citation-informed Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07180/) (2020)
- [Multi-Task Identification of Entities, Relations, and Coreference for Scientific Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09602/) (2018)
- [Entity, Relation, and Event Extraction with Contextualized Span Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03546/) (2019)
- [ScispaCy: Fast and Robust Models for Biomedical Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07669/) (2019)
- [TLDR: Extreme Summarization of Scientific Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.15011/) (2020)
- [Ranking Sentences for Extractive Summarization with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08636/) (2018)
- [Understanding Echo Chambers in E-commerce Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02474/) (2020)
- [Accelerating Innovation Through Analogy Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05585/) (2017)
- [Scientific Language Models for Biomedical Knowledge Base Completion: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09700/) (2021)
- [SciSight: Combining faceted navigation and research group detection for COVID-19 exploratory scientific search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12668/) (2020)
- [SciCo: Hierarchical Cross-Document Coreference for Scientific Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08809/) (2021)
- [The Pace of Artificial Intelligence Innovations: Speed, Talent, and Trial-and-Error](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01812/) (2020)
- [Extracting a Knowledge Base of Mechanisms from COVID-19 Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03824/) (2020)
- [S2AND: A Benchmark and Evaluation System for Author Name Disambiguation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07534/) (2021)
- [Improving End-to-End Sequential Recommendations with Intent-aware Diversification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10171/) (2019)
- [A narrowing of AI research?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10385/) (2020)
- [VitaLITy: Promoting Serendipitous Discovery of Academic Literature with Transformers & Visual Analytics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03366/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Citation Networks to Visualize Scholarly Influence Over Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07135/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Literature-Grounded Novelty Assessment of Scientific Ideas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22026/) (2025)
- [PaperWeaver: Enriching Topical Paper Alerts by Contextualizing Recommended Papers with User-collected Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02939/) (2024)
- [Specialized Document Embeddings for Aspect-based Similarity of Research Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14541/) (2022)
- [ACCoRD: A Multi-Document Approach to Generating Diverse Descriptions of Scientific Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06982/) (2022)
- [The Semantic Reader Project: Augmenting Scholarly Documents through AI-Powered Interactive Reading Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14334/) (2023)
- [Augmenting Scientific Creativity with Retrieval across Knowledge Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01328/) (2022)
- [Tree-of-Debate: Multi-Persona Debate Trees Elicit Critical Thinking for Scientific Comparative Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14767/) (2025)
- [CorpusStudio: Surfacing Emergent Patterns in a Corpus of Prior Work while Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12436/) (2025)
- [Scholar Inbox: Personalized Paper Recommendations for Scientists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08385/) (2025)
- [Inferring Scientific Cross-Document Coreference and Hierarchy with Definition-Augmented Relational Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15113/) (2024)
- [Words as Bridges: Exploring Computational Support for Cross-Disciplinary Translation Work](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18471/) (2025)
- [How Data Scientists Review the Scholarly Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03774/) (2023)
- [TOPICAL: TOPIC Pages AutomagicaLly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01796/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Isolated silos of scientific research and the growing challenge of information overload limit awareness across the literature and hinder innovation. Algorithmic curation and recommendation, which often prioritize relevance, can further reinforce these informational "filter bubbles." In response, we describe Bridger, a system for facilitating discovery of scholars and their work. We construct a faceted representation of authors with information gleaned from their papers and inferred author personas, and use it to develop an approach that locates commonalities and contrasts between scientists to balance relevance and novelty. In studies with computer science researchers, this approach helps users discover authors considered useful for generating novel research directions. We also demonstrate an approach for displaying information about authors, boosting the ability to understand the work of new, unfamiliar scholars. Our analysis reveals that Bridger connects authors who have different citation profiles and publish in different venues, raising the prospect of bridging diverse scientific communities.