Purpose:This paper aims to provide a method to detect research communities based on research interest in researcher network,which combines the topological structure and vertex attributes in a unified manner.Design/methodology/approach:A heterogeneous researcher network has been constructed by combining multiple relations of academic researchers.Vertex attributes and their similarities were considered and calculated.An approach has been proposed and tested to detect research community in research organizations based on this multi-relation researcher network.Findings:Detection of topologically well-connected,semantically coherent and meaningful research community was achieved.Research limitations:The sample size of evaluation experiments was relatively small.In the present study,a limited number of 72 researchers were analyzed for constructing researcher network and detecting research community.Therefore,a large sample size is required to give more information and reliable results.Practical implications:The proposed multi-relation researcher network and approaches for discovering research communities of similar research interests will contribute to collective innovation behavior such as brainstorming and to promote interdisciplinary cooperation.Originality/value:Recent researches on community detection devote most efforts to single-relation researcher networks and put the main focus on the topological structure of networks.In reality,there exist multi-relation social networks.Vertex attribute also plays an important role in community detection.The present study combined multiple single-relational researcher networks into a multi-relational network and proposed a structure-attribute clustering method for detecting research community in research organizations.