Conventional algorithms for fingerprint recognition are mainly based on minutiae information. However, the small number of minutiae in partial fingerprints is still a challenge in fingerprint matching. In this paper, a novel algorithm is proposed to improve the performance of partial fingerprint matching. A simulation scheme was firstly proposed to construct a serial of partial fingerprints with different area. Then, the influence of the fingerprint area in partial fingerprint recognition is studied. By comparing the performance of partial fingerprint recognition with different fingerprint area, some useful conclusions can be drawn: (1) The decrease of the fingerprint area degrades the performance of partial fingerprint recognition; (2) When the fingerprint area decreases, the genuine matching scores will decrease, whereas the imposter matching scores will increase. Based on these observations, we proposed a fusion scheme based on modified support vector machine (SVM) to combine the area information for fingerprint recognition. Experimental result illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.