What’s new in search? Internet Librarian Oct 29th 2007

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Agenda

Search & Information retrieval in the scholarly context

Exploring the different methods of knowledge discovery

The power of the specialised search engine

Experiments in expert-driven, community search

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Options beyond Google in a general sense…

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Scholarly information explodes High amount of published content

Scopus has 30m abstracts ScienceDirect has 8 million articles # of articles published per year by

Elsevier increased from 160K in 2000 to 250K+ in 2005

Amount of scholarly Web content even higher

Scirus currently indexes over 450 million science items

Size general Web has exploded Worldwide Internet: Now

Serving 61 Billion Searches per Month*

*http://searchenginewatch.com/

Web pages indexed in ScirusMillions

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Articles on ScienceDirectMillions

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Finding meaningful content amidst the ‘data smog’General Search is only one option.There are several other, more focussed methods of

content discovery available to researchers.

Browsing Linking Alerting Specialised Searching User collaboration/sharing

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Browsing still effective Journal browsing remains important for content

discovery Users use journal browsing to abreast with subject area

31% of all full text article use on ScienceDirect is a results of journal browsing

Users that start on a journal home page on average download 1.9 articles in a session

User are provided the option to list favourite journals and receive Journal Issue alerts (Table of Contents)

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Linking Reference linking and cited by links are very effective content

discovery methods Publishers are collaborating to ensure correct reference linking

(CrossRef) 8% of all full text article use on ScienceDirect comes from

reference linking. Same is expected from cited-by links Next to reference and cited by links in official literature there is

Web references and cited bys Patent references and cited bys Clustering Author linking

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AlertsPushing relevant content results

Journal Issue alerts (RSS) Top articles alert Citation alert Search alert

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Search yields more than just journal results!

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Subject Specific Search platforms remain important General Web search engines often 1st choice

information tool for scientists (66%) and physicians (55%)*

However, subject specific search platforms remain important

Professionals are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with general search**

Average # full text article downloads per session started from PubMed is 3. For other platforms this is as low as 1.5

* Outsell report for RE Search group** Outsell report – iMarket – Vertical Search Engines Deliver What Big Search Engines miss

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User collaboration/Sharing Discovery through communities and networks

Community-driven sources selection WIKIs Social bookmaking/Tagging Reviewing and commenting Ranking & classification by users

» Active and inactively (through usage & behaviour)

Combining Browse, Link, Alert and Search in a Community and Network-driven system!

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Social bookmarking/tagging For researchers & research groups

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Wikipedia – science content

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Citizendium – science content

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Scholarpedia – example article

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Scirus Topic Pages• Research 2.0 tool developed by Scirus to help librarians and

researchers better utilize the wide range of information resources available in today’s networked world.

• Free, Wiki-like platform for the scientific community

• Experts create topic-centered pages with links to journal and web scientific content

• Great new way for researchers to discover most relevant scientific literature as recommended by expert authors

• Currently in beta at http://topics.scirus.com with a number of sample Scirus Topic Pages to view

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Topic Pages [Beta] Homepage

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Sample topic page

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Key takeaway points• Specialized tools are always better for scholarly

information retrieval• There are several proven techniques for scholarly,

information retrieval• Wikis with integrated expert approval systems are

emerging as real contenders • There are a number of innovations in the area of Research

2.0• Scirus Topic Pages • 2Collab

2020

Thank You!For more information on Scirus visit

http://info.scirus.com