Online Evaluations for Everyone: Mr. DLib's Living Lab for Scholarly Recommendations

We introduce the first 'living lab' for scholarly recommender systems. This lab allows recommender-system researchers to conduct online evaluations of their novel algorithms for scholarly recommendations, i.e., recommendations for research papers, citations, conferences, research grants, etc. Recommendations are delivered through the living lab's API to platforms such as reference management software and digital libraries. The living lab is built on top of the recommender-system as-a-service Mr. DLib. Current partners are the reference management software JabRef and the CORE research team. We present the architecture of Mr. DLib's living lab as well as usage statistics on the first sixteen months of operating it. During this time, 1,826,643 recommendations were delivered with an average click-through rate of 0.21%.