Abstract
In the era of digital transformation, when scholarly literature is rapidly growing, there are hundreds of papers published online daily in different fields, especially in the academic field. The huge volume of research papers published makes it difficult to find an expert/scholar to collaborate within a specific research area. This considers one of the most challenging factors in academia. Many researchers have proposed several methods to rank the authors based on their expertise in a specific area, focusing on co-citation, using keywords and their principal areas of research. The significant relationship or collaborations between scholars are credible. This paper explores the existing methods and tools in related studies to obtain author expertise among the scholarly network in determining the expertise in a specific area. Also, the semantic relations in the heterogeneous networks are presented with an overview of building a visual scholarly network that is beneficial in many pieces of research in data mining and related areas.