# A Semantic Approach to the Academic Publishing Network: Document Vector Representations and Hybrid Structural-Semantic Fusion over OpenAlex Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26218 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26218/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00653/) (2016)
- [From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16130/) (2024)
- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03533/) (2022)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [Efficient and robust approximate nearest neighbor search using Hierarchical Navigable Small World graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09320/) (2016)
- [Towards General Text Embeddings with Multi-stage Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03281/) (2023)
- [C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07597/) (2023)
- [NV-Embed: Improved Techniques for Training LLMs as Generalist Embedding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17428/) (2024)
- [SPECTER: Document-level Representation Learning using Citation-informed Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07180/) (2020)
- [The Faiss library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08281/) (2024)
- [SPLADE: Sparse Lexical and Expansion Model for First Stage Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05720/) (2021)
- [Sparse, Dense, and Attentional Representations for Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00181/) (2020)
- [SciRepEval: A Multi-Format Benchmark for Scientific Document Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13308/) (2022)
- [HybridRAG: Integrating Knowledge Graphs and Vector Retrieval Augmented Generation for Efficient Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04948/) (2024)
- [Neighborhood Contrastive Learning for Scientific Document Representations with Citation Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06671/) (2022)
- [Scientific Paper Recommendation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13538/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Structural graph analysis of the academic publishing network captures the topological relationships between entities but does not see the content of works. Building on our structural approach, this work complements it with a semantic layer and a parameterized structural-semantic fusion. We represent scientific documents by citation-informed vector embeddings (SPECTER2) and store them in an embedded vector database keyed by the stable OpenAlex ID, so that they connect directly to the graph layer. We define a modular late-fusion function that combines semantic similarity (cosine of embeddings) and structural similarity (bibliographic coupling) with a tunable weight alpha whose value is chosen according to the specific task. On the corpus of VSB - Technical University of Ostrava we show two things: citation-informed embeddings agree with the expert OpenAlex topical taxonomy better than a TF-IDF baseline, and in a recommendation use case the structural, semantic, and combined signals carry information in different regimes depending on the available data. Hybrid fusion here is not a universally better method but an explicit mechanism for steering complementary signals according to the task. We release the whole approach as an open-source extension of the apnet library with a reproducible workflow.