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  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>RARD II: The 94 Million Related-Article Recommendation Dataset</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Joeran Beel</string-name>
          <email>beelj@tcd.ie</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Barry Smyth</string-name>
          <email>barry.smyth@insight-centre.org</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">2</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Andrew Collins</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>National Institute of Informatics Tokyo, Digital Content and Media Sciences Division</institution>
          ,
          <country country="JP">Japan</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>Trinity College Dublin, School of Computer Science &amp; Statistics, ADAPT Centre</institution>
          ,
          <country country="IE">Ireland</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff2">
          <label>2</label>
          <institution>University College Dublin, Insight Centre for Data Analytics</institution>
          ,
          <country country="IE">Ireland</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <pub-date>
        <year>2015</year>
      </pub-date>
      <abstract>
        <p>The main contribution of this paper is to introduce and describe a new recommender-systems dataset (RARD II). It is based on data from Mr. DLib, a recommender-system as-a-service in the digital library and reference-management-software domain. As such, RARD II complements datasets from other domains such as books, movies, and music. The dataset encompasses 94m recommendations, delivered in the two years from September 2016 to September 2018. The dataset covers an item-space of 24m unique items. RARD II provides a range of rich recommendation data, beyond conventional ratings. For example, in addition to the usual (implicit) ratings matrices, RARD II includes the original recommendation logs, which provide a unique insight into many aspects of the algorithms that generated the recommendations. The logs enable researchers to conduct various analyses about a real-world recommender system. This includes the evaluation of meta-learning approaches for predicting algorithm performance. In this paper, we summarise the key features of this dataset release, describe how it was generated and discuss some of its unique features. Compared to its predecessor RARD, RARD II contains 64% more recommendations, 187% more features (algorithms, parameters, and statistics), 50% more clicks, 140% more documents, and one additional service partner (JabRef).</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
        <kwd>recommender systems datasets</kwd>
        <kwd>digital libraries</kwd>
        <kwd>click logs</kwd>
      </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>-</title>
      <p>
        The availability of large-scale, realistic, and detailed datasets is an essential element of
many research communities, such as the information retrieval community (e.g. TREC
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1 ref2">1,2</xref>
        ], NTCIR [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3 ref4">3,4</xref>
        ], and CLEF [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5 ref6">5,6</xref>
        ]), the machine learning community (e.g. UCI [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ],
OpenML [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ], KDD Cup [9]) and the recommender systems community. Particularly,
the meta-learning and algorithm section community [10] as well as the automated
machine-learning (AutoML) community [11] depend on large-scale datasets. Such
datasets provide data for researchers to benchmark existing techniques, as well as to
develop, train and evaluate new algorithms. They can also be essential when it comes to
supporting the development of a research community. The recommender-systems
      </p>
      <p>
        community has been well-served by the availability of a number of datasets in popular
domains including movies [12,13], books [14], music [15] and news [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5,16</xref>
        ]. The
importance of these datasets is evidenced by their popularity among researchers and
practitioners; for example, the MovieLens datasets have been downloaded 140,000 times in
2014 [12], and Google Scholar lists some 13,000 research articles and books that
mention one or more of the MovieLens datasets [17].
      </p>
      <p>The recommender-systems community has matured, and the importance of
recommender systems has grown rapidly in the commercial arena. Researchers and
practitioners alike have started to look beyond the traditional e-commerce / entertainment
domains (e.g. books, music, and movies). However, there are few datasets that are
suitable for meta-learning in the context of recommender systems, or suitable for research
in the field of digital libraries. It is with this demand in mind that we introduce the
RARD II dataset. RARD II is based on a digital-library recommender-as-a-service
platform known as Mr. DLib [18–20]. Primarily, Mr. DLib provides related-article type
recommendations based on a source / query article, to a number of partner services
including the social-sciences digital library Sowiport [21–24] and the JabRef
referencemanagement software [25].</p>
      <p>The unique value of RARD II for recommender-systems and algorithm-selection
research, stems from the scale and variety of data that it provides in the domain of digital
libraries. RARD II includes data from 94m recommendations, originating from more
than 13.5m queries. The dataset comprises two full years of recommendations,
delivered between September 2016 and September 2018. Importantly, in addition to
conventional ratings-type data, RARD II includes comprehensive recommendation logs.
These provide a detailed account of the recommendations that were generated – not
only the items that were recommended, but also the context of the recommendation (the
source query and recommendation destination), and meta-data about the algorithms and
parameters used to generate them. Compared to its predecessor RARD I [26] – which
was downloaded 1,489 times between June 2017 and April 2019 – RARD II contains
64% more recommendations, 187% more features (algorithms, parameters, and
statistics), 50% more clicks, 140% more documents, and JabRef as new partner.</p>
      <p>In what follows, we describe this RARD II data release in more detail. We provide
information about the process that generated the dataset and pay particular attention to
a number of the unique features of this dataset.
2</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>Background / Mr. DLib</title>
      <p>Mr. DLib is a recommendation-as-a-service (RaaS) provider [18]. It is designed to
suggest related articles through partner services such as digital libraries or reference
management applications. For example, Mr. DLib provides related-article
recommendations to Sowiport to be presented on Sowiport’s website alongside some source/target
article (see Fig. 1). Sowiport was the largest social science digital library in Germany,
with a corpus of 10m articles (the service was discontinued in December 2017).
(3) Sowiport renders the
XML and displays the
related articles
&lt;XML&gt;</p>
      <p>Source Article
Title: Example Document
Authors: John Doe and Alice Bow
Abstract: This is the document a user
currently looks at and Sowiport wants to
display a list of related articles for.</p>
      <p>(2) Mr. DLib returns a
list of related
articles in XML
(4) If a user clicks a recommendation,
Sowiport sends a notification to Mr. DLib
(1) Sowiport requests</p>
      <p>related-articles
for a source document</p>
      <p>Mr. DLib Web</p>
      <p>Service
Statistics</p>
      <p>Document
Corpus</p>
      <p>Recommender
System
In another use-case, Mr. DLib provides related-article recommendations to JabRef, one
of the most popular open-source reference managers (Fig. 3) [27]. Briefly, when users
select a reference/article in JabRef, the “related articles” tab presents a set of
relatedarticles, retrieved from Mr. DLib. Related-article recommendations are made from the
10m Sowiport corpus, and 14m CORE documents [28–31].
To generate a set of recommendation, Mr. DLib harnesses different recommendation
approaches including content-based filtering. Mr. DLib also uses external
recommendation APIs such as the CORE Recommendation API [32,33] as part of a ‘living lab’
[34]. The algorithm selection and parametrization is managed by Mr. DLib’s A/B
testing engine. The details of the recommendation approach used, including any relevant
parameters and configurations, are logged by Mr. DLib.</p>
      <p>As an example of the data that Mr. DLib logs, when the A/B engine chooses
contentbased filtering, it randomly selects whether to use ‘normal keywords’, ‘key-phrases’
[35] or ‘word embeddings’. For each option, additional parameters are randomly
chosen; e.g., when key-phrases are chosen, the engine randomly selects whether
keyphrases from the ‘title’ or ‘abstract’ are used. Subsequently, the system randomly
selects whether unigrams, bigrams, or trigrams are used. Then, the system randomly
selects how many key-phrases to use to calculate document relatedness, from one to
twenty. The A/B engine also randomly chooses which matching mode to use when
parsing queries [standardQP | edismaxQP]. Finally, the engine selects whether to
rerank recommendations with readership data from Mendeley, and how many
recommendations to return.</p>
      <p>All this information – the queries and responses, user actions, and the
recommendation process meta data – is made available in the RARD II data release.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>The RARD II Dataset</title>
      <p>RARD II is available on http://data.mr-dlib.org and published under “Creative
Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC-BY)” license [36]. The dataset consists of three
subdatasets: (1) the recommendation log; (2) the ratings matrices; and (3) the external
document IDs.
3.1</p>
      <p>The Recommendation Log
The recommendation_log.csv file (20 GB) contains details on each related-article
query from Sowiport and JabRef, and the individual article recommendations returned
by Mr. DLib. A detailed description of every field in the recommendation log is beyond
the scope of this paper (please refer to the dataset’s documentation for full details).
Briefly, the key statistics of the log are presented in Table 1.
The recommendation log contains 93,955,966 rows (Fig. 4), and each row corresponds
to a single recommended item, i.e. a related-article recommendation. All items were
returned in one of the 13,482,392 responses to the 13,482,392 queries by Sowiport and
JabRef. The 13.5m queries were made for 2,663,826 unique source documents (out of
the 24m documents in the corpus). This means, for each of the 2.7m documents,
recommendations were requested 5.2 times on average. For around 21.4m documents in
the corpus, recommendations were never requested.</p>
      <p>Each of the 13.5m responses contains between one and 15 related-article
recommendations – 94m recommendations in total and 6.97 on average per response. The 94m
recommendations were made for 7,224,279 unique documents out of the 24m
documents in the corpus. This means, those documents that were recommended, were
1 The sum of ‘Sowiport’ and ‘JabRef’ does not equal the ‘Total’ number because some documents
were requested by / recommended to both Sowiport and JabRef. However, these documents
are only counted once for the ‘Total’ numbers.
recommended 13 times on average. Around 17m documents in the corpus were never
recommended.
row_id query_id query_received partner src_doc_id rspns_id rec_id algo_id text_field … rec_doc_id re-ranking responded clicked
1 1 18-Sep '16, 4:02 sowiport 5,265 1 1 239 title … 95 yes 18-Sep '16, 4:03 NULL
2 2 18-Sep '16, 4:03 sowiport 854 2 2 21 abstract … 4,588 no 18-Sep '16, 4:04 NULL
3 2 18-Sep '16, 4:03 sowiport 854 2 3 21 abstract … 9,648 no 18-Sep '16, 4:04 18-Sep '16, 4:06
4 2 18-Sep '16, 4:03 sowiport 854 2 4 21 abstract … 445 no 18-Sep '16, 4:04 NULL
5 3 18-Sep '16, 4:05 sowiport 917 3 5 3 NULL … 776 no 18-Sep '16, 4:05 18-Sep '16, 4:08
6 3 18-Sep '16, 4:05 sowiport 917 3 6 3 NULL … 95 no 18-Sep '16, 4:05 NULL
… … … … … … … … … … … … … …
93,955,963 13,482,391 30-Sep '18, 23:48 jabref 5,265 13,482,391 93,955,963 21 abstract … 95 no 30-Sep '18, 23:48 30-Sep '18, 23:48
93,955,964 13,482,391 30-Sep '18, 23:48 jabref 5,265 13,482,391 93,955,964 21 abstract … 5,846 no 30-Sep '18, 23:48 30-Sep '18, 23:50
93,955,965 13,482,391 30-Sep '18, 23:48 jabref 5,265 13,482,391 93,955,965 21 abstract … 778 no 30-Sep '18, 23:48 NULL
93,955,966 13,482,392 30-Sep '18, 23:50 sowiport 64 13,482,392 93,955,966 12 title … 168 yes 30-Sep '18, 23:51 NULL
For each recommended article, the recommendation log contains more than 40 features
(columns) including:
• Information about the partner, query article, and time.
• The id of the recommendation response, recommended articles, and various
ranking information before and after Mr. DLib’s A/B selection.
• Information about the recommendation technique used, including algorithm
features (relevancy and popularity metrics, content features where relevant) and the
processing time needed to generate these recommendations.</p>
      <p>• The user response (a click/selection, if any) and the time of this response.
The log includes 113,954 clicks received for the 94m recommendations, which equals
a click-through rate (CTR) of 0.12%. Clicks were counted only once, i.e. if a user
clicked the same recommendations multiple times, only the first click was logged.
103,856 of the 13.5m responses contained at least one clicked recommendation
(0.77%). Based on feedback from colleagues and reviewers, we are aware that many
believe a CTR of 0.12% would be very low as in some other recommender systems
CTR is 5% and higher [37]. However, these other recommender systems provide
personalized recommendations and display recommendations very prominently, for
instance, in a pop-up dialog. Recommender systems that are like Mr. DLib – i.e. systems
that provide non-personalized related-item recommendations in an unobtrusive way –
achieve CTRs similar to Mr. DLib, or lower. The various user-interface factors that
influence click-through rates are beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that
the Mr. DLib recommendations are typically presented in a manner that is designed not
to distract the user, which no doubt tends to reduce the CTR.2</p>
      <p>RARD II’s recommendation log enables researchers to reconstruct the fine details
of these historic recommendation sessions, and the responses of users, for the purpose
of benchmarking and/or evaluating new article recommendation strategies, and training
machine-learning models for meta-learning and algorithm selection.
2 We recently re-implemented the system of Mr. DLib and observed higher click-through rates
of around 0.7%. Presumably this may be caused by a much larger number of indexed items in
the new Mr. DLib (120 million instead of 24 million). However, further analysis is necessary.</p>
      <p>One example of an analysis would be the analysis how the effectiveness of the
recommender system changes over time (Fig. 5). Between September 2016 and
mid-February 2017, Mr. DLib delivered around 10 million recommendations per month to
Sowiport. This number decreases to around 2 million recommendations per month from
February 2017 onwards. This is due to a change in technology. In the beginning,
Sowiport requested recommendations from their server also when web crawlers were
crawling Sowiport’s website. In February, Sowiport began to use a JavaScript client that was
ignoring web crawlers. Click-through rate for Sowiport is slightly decreasing over time
from around 0.17% in the beginning to around 0.14% in November 2017. Since
December 2017, click-through rate on Sowiport decreased to near 0%. This decrease is
due to Sowiport’s termination of its main service, i.e. the search function, in December
2017. The search interface is deactivated, although the individual article’s detail pages
are still online. These pages are still indexed in Google and lead to some visitors on
Sowiport. However, these visitors typically leave the website soon and click few or
even no recommendations.</p>
      <p>In April 2017, JabRef integrated Mr. DLib into its Version 4.0 beta (Fig. 5). The
users of this beta version requested 1.7 thousand recommendations in April 2017. These
numbers increased to 17 thousand recommendations in May and remained stable
around 25 thousand recommendations in the following months until September 2017.
Click-through rate during these months was comparatively high (up to 0.82%).
Following the final release of JabRef Version 4.0 in October 2017, the volume of
recommendations increased by factor 6, to an average of 150 thousand recommendations per
month. The click-through rate stabilised around 0.2%.
Further to content-based filtering recommendation approaches, Mr. DLib also
recommends documents according to manually defined user-models with our stereotype
algorithm [38]. We also recommend frequently viewed documents with our most-popular
algorithm[38]. Content-based filtering algorithms are used most frequently, as our
previous evaluations show that these are most effective for users of Sowiport and Jabref
[19,38,39]. The distribution of algorithm usage within RARD II is shown in Fig. 6.</p>
      <p>100,000,000
/ )OLG 10,000,000</p>
      <p>1,000,000
OFSETS ADTIONS( 100,000
BERNUM MENCEOMR 110,,001000000
10
1
RARD II’s detailed log entries make it uniquely suitable for analyses of algorithm
selection approaches. Because all parameters for each algorithm are logged, as well as
scenario attributes such as the time of day, the relationships between algorithm
performance and this meta-data may be learned and evaluated. Meta-learning could be used
to predict optimal algorithms per-request, using logged scenario attributes as
meta-features. For example, a specific variant of content-based filtering might be most effective
for users of Jabref at a certain time of day. Furthermore, as RARD II includes data from
multiple recommendation scenarios, algorithm performance could be learned at a
macro/global level, i.e., per platform [40].</p>
      <p>Based on RARD II’s recommendation logs, researchers could also analyse the
performance of Mr. DLib’s different recommendation algorithms and variations as shown
in Fig. 7. The figure shows the CTR for the content-based filtering recommendations,
stereotype recommendations, most-popular recommendations and a random
recommendations baseline. In the first month, until February 2017, the CTR of all
recommendation approaches is similar, i.e. between 0.1% and 0.2%. In March 2017, CTR for all
approaches except content-based filtering decreases to near zero. We assume this to be
due to the JavaScript that Sowiport used since March 2017, and which did not deliver
recommendations to web spiders. Apparently, the comparatively high CTR of
stereotype, most-popular and random recommendations was caused by web spiders following
just all hyperlinks including the recommendations. As mentioned before, CTR for all
recommendations, including content-based filtering, decreases again in December 2017
when Sowiport terminated its search feature.
UM /
N S
SET
100,000,000
10,000,000
1,000,000
100,000
10,000
1,000
100
10
1
0.4%
0.3% RT)</p>
      <p>C(
ARET</p>
      <p>UORGH
0.2% HT</p>
      <p>ICKL-C
0.1%
0.0%
10,000,000
1,000,000
100,000
NSO 10,000
OF TAI
UM /
N S
ETS
1,000
100
10
1
RARD II also allows researchers to analyse the impact that processing time has on
click-through rate. Fig. 9 shows that the longer users need to wait for recommendations,
the lower the click-through rate becomes. This holds true for all algorithms being used
in Mr. DLib. For instance, when content-based filtering recommendations are returned
within 2 second, the average CTR is 0.16%. If recommendations are returned after 5
seconds, CTR decreases to 0.11% and if recommendations are returned after 10
seconds, CTR decreases to 0.06%. This finding correlates with findings in other
information retrieval applications such as search engines [41,42].</p>
      <p>RARD II’s recommendation log allows for many analyses more. Examples include
or own analyses of the effect of bibliometric re-ranking [43], position bias (effect of a
recommendation’s rank, regardless of its actual relevance) [44], choice overload (effect
of the number of displayed recommendations) [45], and the effect of the document field
being used for content-based filtering [46].</p>
      <p>The recommendation logs may also be used to research the effect that the feature type
in content-based filtering has on performance (Fig. 8). Surprisingly, standard keywords
perform best as shown in Fig. 8. For instance, CTR for key phrases and word
embeddings is 0.04% and 0.05% respectively in October 2017. In contrast, CTR of standard
terms is 0.16% in October.
0.4%
0.0%
0.18
100,000,000
g 10,000,000
)
o
l( 1,000,000
s
n
o
i
s
s
e
r
p
m
I
100,000
10,000
1,000
100
10
1
Impressions
All algorithms 0.11
Stereotype
Most Popular
Random
CBF
Terms
Keyphrases
Embeddings</p>
      <p>0
29275k</p>
      <p>Fig. 9. CTR based on time to calculate recommendations
A ratings matrix is a mainstay of most recommendation datasets. RARD II contains
two implicit, item-item rating matrices discussed below. Implicit ratings are based on
the assumption that when users click a recommended article it is because they find the
recommendation relevant (a positive rating). And, conversely if they don’t click a
recommendation it is because the recommendation is not relevant (a negative rating). Of
course, neither of these assumptions is particularly reliable. For example, just because
a user selects a recommendation doesn’t mean it will turn out to be relevant. Likewise,
a user may choose not to respond if a recommendation is not relevant, or they may
simply not notice the recommendation. However, click-related metrics such as
clickthrough rate are a commonly used metric, particularly in industry, and are a good first
indication of relevance.</p>
      <p>The full ratings matrix rating_matrix_full.csv (1.8 GB) is illustrated in Fig. 10.
It contains 48,879,170 rows, one for each &lt;source document; recommended
document&gt; tuple. For each tuple, the following information is provided.</p>
      <p>• The id of the source document (src_doc_id) for which Sowiport or JabRef queried
recommendations. In a typical recommendation scenario, this entity may be
interpreted as the user to whom recommendations were made.
• The id of a related-article (rec_doc_id) that was returned for the query. This entity
may be interpreted as the item that was recommended to the ‘user’.
• The number of times (#displayed) the tuple occurs in the recommendation log,
i.e. how often the article was recommended as related to the given source
document.
• The number of times the recommended article was clicked by a user (#clicks).
• The click-through rate (CTR), which represents an implicit rating of how relevant
the recommended document was for the given source document.</p>
      <p>row_id
1
2
3
4
…
48,879,167
48,879,168
48,879,169
48,879,170
src_doc_id (user) rec_doc_id (item) # displayed # clicks ctr (rating)
2 95 18 - 0%
18 4,588 5 2 40%
18 16,854,445 1 - 0%
56 985 12 10 83%
… … … … …
24,523,730 776 64 1 2%
24,523,730 125,542 5 - 0%
24,523,738 6,645 8 - 0%
24,523,738 68,944 1 1 100%
The full rating matrix was computed based on the full recommendation log. Hence, it
also includes data from responses for which none of the recommendations were clicked.
There are at least three reasons why users sometimes did not click on any
recommendation: users may not have liked any of the recommendations; users may not have seen
the recommendation; or recommendations may have been delivered to a web spider or
bot that did not follow the hyperlinks. In the latter two cases, the non-clicks should not
be interpreted as a negative vote. However, it is not possible to identify, which of the
three scenarios applies for those sets in which no recommendation was clicked.
Therefore, we created a filtered rating matrix.</p>
      <p>The filtered ratings matrix rating_matrix_filtered.csv (26 MB) contains
745,167 rows and has the same structure (Fig. 11) as the full ratings matrix (Fig. 10).
However, the matrix is based only on responses in which at least one recommendation
from the response was clicked. The rationale is that when at least one recommendation
was clicked, a real user must have looked at the recommendations who decided to click
some recommendations and to not click others. Consequently, the non-clicked
recommendations are more likely to correspond to an actual negative vote. Compared to the
full matrix, the rows are missing that represent &lt;source document; recommended
document&gt; tuples that were delivered in responses that did not receive any clicks. Also,
the remaining rows tend to have lower #displayed counts than in the full-ratings matrix.
id
1
2
3
…
745,165
745,166
745,167
src_doc_id (user) rec_doc_id (item) # displayed # clicks ctr (rating)
2 95 13 - 0%
18 4,588 2 2 100%
56 985 11 10 91%
… … … … …
24,523,730 776 32 1 3%
24,523,730 125,542 2 - 0%
24,523,738 68,944 1 1 100%
There are certainly more alternatives to create the implicit ratings matrix. For instance,
one may argue that recommendation sets in which all recommendations were clicked,
might have been ‘clicked’ by a web spider, which simply followed all hyperlinks on a
website. Based on the recommendation log, researchers can create their own implicit
ratings matrix.</p>
      <p>Fig. 12 shows the distribution of views and clicks of the tuples (query document;
recommended document). 93.9% of all tuples occur only once. This means, it rarely
happened that a document pair (source document x and recommended article y) was
recommended twice or even more often. Actually, only 4.72% of the tuples were
delivered twice, and 0.73% of the tuples were delivered three times. Most of these tuples did
not receive any click (85.48%). 14% of the tuples received one click, and 0.4% received
two clicks.
The third element of the data release is the list of external document ids
(external_IDs.csv, 924 MB). There are 33m such ids for the Sowiport and CORE documents
used. In addition, for a subset of the Sowiport ids there is associated identifiers for
Mendeley (18%), ISSN (16%), DOI (14%), Scopus IDs (13%), ISBN (11%), PubMed
IDs (7%) and arXiv IDs (0.4%). This third subset is provided to facilitate researchers
in obtaining additional document data and meta-data from APIs provided by Sowiport
[47], CORE [48], and Mendeley [49].
4</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>Discussion &amp; Related Work</title>
      <p>We have introduced RARD II, a large-scale, richly detailed dataset for recommender
systems research based on more than 94m delivered scientific article recommendations.
It contributes to a growing number of such datasets, most focusing on ratings data,
ranging in scale from a few thousand datapoints to tens or even hundreds of millions
of datapoints [50].</p>
      <p>The domain of the RARD II data release (article recommendation) distinguishes it
from more common e-commerce domains, but it is not unique in this regard [51–56].
Among others, CiteULike [57,58] and Bibsonomy [59,60] published datasets
containing the social tags that their users added to research articles and, although not intended
specifically for use in recommender systems research, these datasets have nonetheless
been used to evaluate research-paper recommender systems [61–69]. Jack et al.
compiled a Mendeley dataset [70] based on 50,000 randomly selected personal libraries
from 1.5m users and with 3.6m unique articles. Similarly, Docear published a dataset
based on its recommender system [71] based on the metadata of 9.4m articles, their
citation network, related user information, and the details of 300,000 recommendations.</p>
      <p>While RARD II shares some similarities with some of these datasets, particularly
Docear and, of course, its predecessor RARD I [26], it is one of the only examples of a
dataset from the digital library domain that has been specifically designed to support
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as dealing with noise is a crucial task in real-world recommender systems that are used
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    </sec>
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      <title>Limitations and Future Work</title>
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