Literature Search through Mixed-Membership Community Discovery

Given a research topic (e.g. reconstruction of the 1918 influenza virus) and a couple of seminal papers on that topic (e.g. [4] and [6]), how do we find authors who are conducting similar research? Traditional solutions to this problem include looking at the citations in the seminal papers and/or conducting Web searches on keywords associated with the chosen topic. Both of these commonly used solutions have biases that limit their effectiveness. For example, looking only at the citations of a paper provides a partial view of the domain (namely, the ones provided by the authors). Doing a Web search on keywords neglects the wealth of information embedded in social networks (such as co-authorship graphs).