Web of Science is different because it is a “citation index.” That is

“WOS is more like google than anything else, because it gives weight to some results.” – Joe Janes

Citation databases – “one way to go after valuable literature is to find it by subject. Another way, a certain author is really well known lets read her.

“I want to find every article that cites a really good article. If an article cites, i.e. links to, a certain paper, author, book?”

Web analytics comes from bibliometrics. Bibliometrics is the study of how an author or work is cited in scholarly works.

In other words, WOS finds the “links” between scholarly articles in the same way that Google finds hyperlinks between Web pages.

Just trying to search an author, I had a difficult time.

Errata (pl.) – an error in printing or writing.

Check out Journal Citation Reports in ISI Web of Science. – look at relevance measurements, i.e. Eigenfactor, Impact Factor

——————————

Issues with Scholarly Publishing, both monographs and journals

All of the forces in scholarly publishing are interlocked, so focusing on one aspect will not fix the problems with the system.

Increasingly, Scholars are working together collaboratively and cross-disciplinarily.

Scholarship and research are discipline dependent, i.e. depends on if your a scholar in physics, lit studies, communication or engineering

Forms of publishing evolving, i.e. principally to electronic format, but also in other ways.

Issues of assessment in the new scholarly publishing environment.

Tenure and promotion are integral components to the scholarly publishing regime.

Tenure is a guard for academic freedom. Tenure is a lifetime job.

This week we are running workshops on how to search MathScinet, Web of Science and Inspec for the 4th year MSci project students.

The Maths projects blog can be found at http://mathsprojects.wordpress.com/ – it has loads of useful links and info on researching for projects.

If you think this kind of session would be useful for your students – please let us know.

An academic research support specialist at Mayo Clinic Florida was working on a journal manuscript submission which included the following reference in the bibliography: Willis RA. The spread of tumours in the human body. New York: Butterworths & Co. 1975; 216.  Attempting to verify the reference before submission, the specialist consulted Amazon.com, Google Scholar and “surfs the internet” where two editions were discovered, 1952 and 1973, but nothing for 1975.  Suspecting something was amiss, the specialist asked the library for assistance.

I started with our own online catalog (http://mayo.iii.com/) and searched by the author. Two entries matched title and author but neither had a copyright of 1975.

(I wondered why we didn’t have the 1973 edition?)

Moving from our local catalog to FirstSearch and WorldCat from OCLC, 12 different entries for this particular book turned up, but none was for an edition published in 1975 by Butterworths & Co in New York.  This screenshot shows the 1934, 1952 and 1973 editions.

Not quite ready to concede that a 1975 edition didn’t exist —most of the information seemed correct—title, author, part of the publisher — I decided to check the Web of Science cited reference search to see if anyone had cited the 1975 edition.

Sure enough, the fourth entry revealed that 7 papers had cited p. 216 of the 1975 edition.

In this display 4 out of the 7 entries are shown based on our subscribed access from 1993:

I accessed the full text of the first entry and checked the bibliography:

So, what does this mean?  An incorrect citation was created, and from there it snowballed to other citation errors in the medical literature.  When we told our author that we could find no evidence of a 1975 edition, he withdrew the reference from his bibliography.

Ann Farrell, Medical Librarian, Winn Dixie Medical Library, Mayo Clinic Florida

Come and learn how to find information for your projects at the library’s introductory database sessions. These sessions are primarily aimed at undergraduates. Life Sciences students may find the sessions on CSA, Web of Science, PubMed, using the internet and reading & note taking useful:  

Using CSA (Cambridge Scientific Abstracts). CSA covers major areas of research, including environmental sciences, materials science, biological sciences, engineering and computer science.

Using Web of Science. This multidisciplinary database covers a wide range of subjects including science, engineering, humanities, medicine and social sciences. It also includes cited references for all articles.

Using EBSCO Business Source Complete. Ebsco provides access to a wealth of business information including company and country reports and full-text journal articles. This session is for business and non-business students who need to find business information for their projects.

Using PubMed. This is the most comprehensive source for biomedical articles. This session is for students who need to find information in medicine and related subjects.

Intelligent use of the Internet – learn which sources on the Internet to trust We all use the internet but we don’t always know how reliable it is. This session will show you how to decide whether the information you find on the internet is valuable research or just plain rubbish!

Cross-search multiple databases using Metalib, the library’s portal. This information portal provides access to databases and electronic journals subscribed to by the Library. Many of the resources can be cross-searched, where a single search is carried out on more than one database.

RefWorks – learn how to store your references and create a reference list.

Reading & Note Taking – learn techniques for improving your reading and note taking skills

All sessions are in Training room 1 on Level 1 of the Central Library. To see the full timetable and to book please complete the booking form at: www.imperial.ac.uk/library/lrspbooking to register for any of these sessions.

…what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause

Thomson, in a commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reckon there ain’t nowt wrong with the Journal Impact Factor:

The impact factor has had success and utility as a journal metric due to its concentration on a simple calculation based on data that are fully visible in the Web of Science. These examples based on citable (counted) items indexed in 2000 and 2005 suggest that the current approach for identification of citable items in the impact factor denominator is accurate and consistent.

Well, they would say that.

And they might well be right, and you and I and Thomson Reuters might argue the point endlessly. But there are a number of problems with any citation-based metric, and a pretty fundamental one was highlighted (coincidentally?) in the same issue of JAMA.

Looking at thre general medical journals, Abhaya Kulkarni at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto (shout out to my friend Ricardipus) and co. found that three different ways of counting citations come up with three very different numbers.

Cutting to the chase, Web of Science counted about 20% fewer citations than Scopus or Google Scholar. The reasons for this are not totally clear, but are probably due to the latter two being of wider scope (no pun intended). Scopus, for example, looks at ~15,000 journals compared with Web of Science’s ten thousand. Why? The authors say that Web of Science ‘emphasized the quality of its content coverage’: which in English means it doesn’t look at non-English publications, or those from outside the US and (possibly) Europe, or other citation sources such as books and conference proceedings. And that’s before we even start thinking about minimal citable units; or non-citable outputs; or whether blogs should count as one-fiftieth of a peer-reviewed paper.

Presumably some of the discrepancy is due to removal of self-cites, which strikes me as being just as unfair: my own output shouldn’t count for less simply because I’m building on it. It’s also difficult to know how to deal with the mobility of sciences: do you only look at the last author? or the first? I don’t know how you make that one work at all, to be honest.

That aside, I think curation of citation metrics is necessary: Kulkarni et al. report that fully two percent of citations in Google Scholar didn’t, actually, cite what they claimed to. That is a worrying statistic when you realize that people’s jobs are on the line. You have to get this right, guys.

But it’d be nice if we could all agree on the numbers to start with.

Postscript

The thought of throwing out the Journal Impact Factor is, actually, a scary one (not least, presumably, to Thomson Reuters) because we’re all familiar with it. But as the REF looms and scientists’ careers and dreams are increasingly on the line, we have to ask whether we’re doing the right thing. I’m not at all convinced by the ‘Churchill’ argument—that there’s nothing better—as there’s too much at stake. Shall we chicken out, and

… rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

As Vince Smith once put it [1] data are the fuel of Science:

“The fabric of science is changing, driven by a revolution in digital technologies that facilitate the acquisition and communication of massive amounts of data. This is changing the nature of collaboration and expanding opportunities to participate in science. If digital technologies are the engine of this revolution, digital data are its fuel. But for many scientific disciplines, this fuel is in short supply.”

Despite the importance of data, some scientists are often really bad at sharing it properly. So why don’t scientists share data?

Nature has a special issue dedicated to this topic published today at nature.com/news/specials/datasharing [2,3,4,5] which isn’t behind a pay wall (at the moment). It describes some of the technical and cultural barriers to data sharing. You should go and read it yourself if you’re interested, but here is a very brief and incomplete summary, with some extra points thrown in for good measure:

• Some funding bodies do not adequately support the research projects they sponsor in sharing data properly, both before and after publication.
• Many scientists lack awareness, incentives and knowledge of data sharing which can be compounded by a fear of being “scooped”.
• Public databases, often a more natural home for data than traditional publications, are frequently undervalued by a publish or perish culture [6].
• Traditional scientific publishing is frequently (and ironically) a really inadequate method for sharing data. Important data and metadata routinely gets damaged or destroyed in the process of publishing [7].
• The technical infrastructure for long term data sharing either does not exist or is not understood by those who should be providing and using it. This can lead to empty archive syndrome.

These are some of the reasons that scientists don’t share data. Which raises the question, how do we get out of this mess? The special issue offers some solutions [3,4] to these cultural and technical problems, including the use of Creative Commons licenses. It’s good to see these important issues given a higher profile but we will probably be striving for better data sharing for many years to come.

References

1. Vince Smith (2009). Data publication: towards a database of everything BMC Research Notes, 2 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1756-0500-2-113
2. Anonymous (2009). Data’s shameful neglect: Research cannot flourish if data are not preserved and made accessible. Nature, 461 (7261), 145-145 DOI: 10.1038/461145a
3. Schofield, P., Bubela, T., Weaver, T., Portilla, L., Brown, S., Hancock, J., Einhorn, D., Tocchini-Valentini, G., Hrabe de Angelis, M., & Rosenthal, N. (2009). Post-publication sharing of data and tools Nature, 461 (7261), 171-173 DOI: 10.1038/461171a
4. Toronto International Data Release Workshop Authors (2009). Prepublication data sharing Nature, 461 (7261), 168-170 DOI: 10.1038/461168a
5. Bryn Nelson (2009). Data sharing: Empty archives Nature, 461 (7261), 160-163 DOI: 10.1038/461160a
6. Michael Seringhaus, & Mark Gerstein (2007). Publishing perishing? Towards tomorrow’s information architecture BMC Bioinformatics, 8 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1471-2105-8-17
7. Duncan Hull, Steve Pettifer, & Douglas Kell (2008). Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web PLoS Computational Biology, 4 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204

[CC-licensed picture of Sharing by ryancr, more commentary on this post over at friendfeed.]

“La ciencia en España no va bien, va mejor“, afirman Emilio Delgado López-Cozar, Evaristo Jiménez Contreras y Rafael Ruiz-Pérez, tras analizar las publicaciones de los investigadores españoles con la información suministrada por Thomson Reuters en ScienceWatch, en un reciente artículo publicado en el último número de El profesional de la información:

- La ciencia española a través de la Web of Science (1996-2007): las disciplinas

Cuantitativamente, número de artículos publicados, constatan que la producción científica española ha tenido un crecimiento sostenido a nivel mundial en todas las disciplinas, y muy especialmente en Ciencias del Espacio (Astrofísica y Astronomía, básicamente), Agricultura, Matemáticas, Microbiología, Química, Ciencia de las plantas y los animales, Ecología y Física.

Cualitativamente, en lo que se refiere al impacto (número de citas recibidas) de las investigaciones publicadas, nuestro país sigue estando por debajo de la media mundial aunque la diferencia se ha reducido progresivamente y de forma notable (-17,7% en 1996-2000, y -6,3% en 2003-2007) en la última decada. Así, a las disciplinas que ya en el periodo 1996-2000 tenían una gran visibilidad, con medias por encima del impacto medio mundial, como Física, Agricultura, Ingeniería, Ciencias del espacio y Química, se les han unido en 2003-2007 Medicina clínica, Ciencia de los materiales y Ciencia de las plantas y los animales.

No obstante, y aunque en algunos campos de investigación se han realizado considerables progresos en cuanto a visibilidad e impacto, como en Medicina clínica (+32%), Psicología/Psiquiatría (+27%), Ecología (+21%), y Biología & Bioquímica (+18%), algunas disciplinas siguen presentando porcentajes de impacto inferiores al 20% mundial: Economía (-31%), Psicología/Psiquíatría (-25%), Informática (-25%), Biología molecular (-21%) e Inmunología (-20%).

Frente a estos resultados optimistas resulta cuando menos preocupante y paradójico que hoy a los estudiantes no les resulte atractivo estudiar ciencias ni en España ni en el mundo occidental en general. El declive de la ciencia y de la cultura científica en nuestra sociedad es el tema de un ensayo que recomendamos especialmente y que ha recibido comentarios elogiosos en nuestro blog:

- Elías, Carlos: La razón estrangulada.

“Real Facts, real numbers, real Knowledge” is the catch phrase that Web Of Science communication people seem to adress to competitors… guess which one?

Among the suggested “Find out”: WoS is “indisputably “the largest (with 45 millions records), the only true cited reference index, is publisher-neutral…

Withour any doubt, a nice offensive from Thomson against Elsevier…

http://isiwebofknowledge.com/realfacts

Verano y vacaciones para todos menos para los recursos electrónicos que te ofrece la Biblioteca Universitaria de Sevilla; si necesitas consultarlos puedes hacerlo desde donde quiera que estés: IOP Science, Iustel, Jstor, Emerald, Ebsco, CRCnetBASE, ISI Web of Knowledge, Nature, E-Libro, Engineering Information, Web of  Science, ScienceDirect, Taylor & Francis, Oxford University PressProQuest, CSIC, GreenData, SpringerLink, Refworks…
Ver más en Noticias de la BUS.

Muchas veces es complicado llevar el seguimiento de las publicaciones de un investigador o de un autor. Esta complicación se puede ver aumentada en el caso de apellidos muy comunes o cuando el autor tiene varios apellidos, como es el caso español.

En el caso español, los grupos de investigación del EC3 de la Universidad de Granada y Análisis Cuantitativos de Ciencia y Tecnología del CINDOC-CSIC elaboraron un documento para la FECYT con el objeto de hacer unas recomendaciones para fomentar fórmulas de firma normalizada de los investigadores españoles en sus publicaciones científicas, tanto en lo que se refiere a nombres personales como institucionales. Os dejo el documento en formato pdf. Estoy intentando localizar si existe una versión más actualizada, mientras tanto os dejo la versión 17/01/07.

En el ámbito anglosajón existen varios sitios en internet que han intentado paliar estos problemas. Uno de ellos es ResearcherID:

ResearcherID is a website where invited researchers can register for a unique researcher ID number. At this site, users can update their profile information, build their publication list using Web of Science and ISI Web of Knowledge search services or uploading a file, and select to make their profile public or private. Registered as well as non-registered users can search the ResearcherID Registry to view profiles and find potential collaborators.

Aunque no está completo, os dejo un video tutorial de esta herramienta:

Os añado más enlaces con información relacionada sobre este tema:

• IraLis (International Registry for Authors: Links to Identify Scientists): pensado sobre todo para el caso español.
• Researcher Identification Primer (focuses on using OpenID for author identification)
• The Universal Author Identification System (UAI_Sys)
• New author tools in Web of Science and Scopus evaluated (tests the author searching systems built into the Web of Science and Scopus databases)
• The Scopus Author Identifier

(Parte de esta información ha sido elaborada a partir de Liblog: Newsletter of the Mayo Clinic Libraries)

Fragen in den Blogs:

Zugangsprobleme zu WoS

Folien gedreht

eTest

Faden verloren

der Sinn der Wortabstände / ADJ ist nicht richtig klar geworden. Wie kann ich damit suchen?

aus welchem Suchportal sind die in der Recherchestrategie gezeigten Suchmasken entnommen?
Auf welchen anderen Portalen kann man diese Art der Suchverfeinerung verwenden?

wozu ist SFX im WoS gut?

impact factor

Qualität der Recherche

Identify the most influential journals and papers in your field by searching Web of Knowledge’s Journal Citation Reports, still the only journal evalulation resource that provides quantifiable, statistical information based on citation data. The data for 2008 has now been released bringing the reports fully up to date.

New features added to the latest release of JCR data allow you to:

- View a journal’s impact with a five year Impact Factor trend graph.

- See how journal self citations affect Imapct Factor.

- Rank journals in multiple categories.

Find out more on the Journal Citation Reports site.

Just when you think you have the next great idea somebody’s already beaten you to it. The Citation Mapping Tool from Thompson’s Web of Science is another one of those kick ass tools. Its apparently been out since July 2008. Shame on me for not doing better research into existing tools.

CITATION MAPS IN WEB OF SCIENCE

The citation mapping tool tracks an article’s cited and citing references through two generations, allowing researchers to visually discover an article’s wider relationships:

* Go forward and backward in time to track citing and cited references

* Color code, re-configure and organize your citation maps to discover trends in citation activity

* Completely interactive!

* Access via any Web of Science full record

via Citation Mapping.

They also have a nice little tutorial.

I also found this review from Brian D. Simboli, Science Librarian, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The review appears to be extensive. I haven’t had a chance to thoroughly read it but he does provide a good overview of

1. how it works,
2. how it can be used (teaching, visualization, documenting impact of submitted articles, etc) and,
3. possible improvements (too many to list here but its worth jumping to the Comments and Suggestion and Future Directions section to read)

It will be interesting to know how this tool is really used and if it is successful.

A non-objective (because done by an Elsevier guy) comparison of scopus
Versus WoS

 http://www.slideshare.net/galih5/web-of-science-scopus