Together with Yi Fang (Purdue University, USA), Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Pavel Serdyukov (Yandex, Russia), and Luo Si (Purdue University, USA), I wrote a survey paper on Expertise Retrieval for the Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval (FnTIR) journal, which is now available online. (If your organization doesn’t have a subscription, you can get a free copy from my homepage.)
The study offers a comprehensive overview of expertise retrieval, primarily from an IR perspective, but many other aspects of this multi-faceted research area are also covered. Our main attention is on models and algorithms, which are organized in five groups of basic approaches. We discuss extensions of these models as well as practical considerations. At the end of the survey, we identify a number of possible future directions; these could be of particular interest to those currently working in this area.