Finding relevant publications is important for scientists who have to cope
with exponentially increasing numbers of scholarly material. Algorithms can
help with this task as they help for music, movie, and product recommendations.
However, we know little about the performance of these algorithms with
scholarly material. Here, we develop an algorithm, and an accompanying Python
library, that implements a recommendation system based on the content of
articles. Design principles are to adapt to new content, provide near-real time
suggestions, and be open source. We tested the library on 15K posters from the
Society of Neuroscience Conference 2015. Human curated topics are used to cross
validate parameters in the algorithm and produce a similarity metric that
maximally correlates with human judgments. We show that our algorithm
significantly outperformed suggestions based on keywords. The work presented
here promises to make the exploration of scholarly material faster and more
accurate.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure