The second article in our 10th Anniversary Series is by Abel Packer. He is the director of the SciELO Program which has transformed scholarly publishing in Latin America. Given SciELO's multi-lingual reach, this post appears in English, Portuguese and Spanish. - Anurag Acharya.

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SciELO, Google Scholar e os periódicos da América Latina

O SciELO tem 16 anos. Hoje, publica aproximadamente mil periódicos selecionados, revisados por pares, de acesso aberto, agrupados em coleções nacionais. A Rede SciELO é formada atualmente por 16 coleções nacionais, 13 da América Latina, e também Portugal, Espanha e África do Sul.

A função primordial do SciELO é prover visibilidade crescente e sustentável à pesquisa comunicada por periódicos publicados nacionalmente. Quando o SciELO foi lançado, estes periódicos existiam apenas na versão impressa, geralmente com uma pequena base de assinantes. Poucos periódicos eram indexados em índices de citações e não havia forma de determinar o impacto real ou potencial que muitos dos periódicos tinham em suas respectivas áreas.

Hoje, estimamos em aproximadamente um milhão de downloads diários através da rede, 500 mil deles do SciELO Brasil de acordo com estatísticas compatíveis com a iniciativa COUNTER. O número total de artigos hospedados através da rede SciELO ultrapassa 450 mil.

Como o SciELO obteve tal sucesso na criação de uma operação tão ampla e conseguiu um desempenho tão impressionante em termos de downloads? Por que tantos países e periódicos aderiram à rede SciELO?

Existem quatro fatores principais. O primeiro, a reputação e liderança das organizações dirigentes. O projeto SciELO foi estabelecido e desenvolvido pela Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP), amplamente reconhecida no Brasil como a mais eficiente e avançada agencia de fomento no país, e o Centro Latino-Americano e do Caribe de Informação em Ciências da Saúde (BIREME), que é afiliado à Organização Pan-Americana da Saúde e à OMS. A motivação inicial da parceria foi desenvolver um índice de citações abarcando uma coleção de periódicos mais abrangente além dos 17 que estavam indexados no Journal Citation Reports do ISI. Logo após o lançamento, a Comissão Nacional de Pesquisa Científica e Tecnológica do Chile (CONICYT) aderiu à iniciativa. A partir de 2002, o Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) e outras agências nacionais de pesquisa também passaram a apoiar o SciELO.

Segundo, os critérios de aceitação seletivos aplicados aos periódicos das coleções SciELO. Apenas periódicos de acesso aberto e revisados por pares com corpo editorial formado por pesquisadores renomados, índice de rejeição de manuscritos razoável e processo de publicação compatível com padrões eram aceitos. Os melhores periódicos do Brasil foram convidados pela FAPESP para integrar o SciELO. CONICYT adotou enfoque similar para o SciELO Chile. Isso ajudou a definir a expectativa de critérios de aceitação seletivos para novas coleções nacionais.

Terceiro, o tremendo impacto do Google Scholar, que foi decisivo para avançar com o programa. Tão logo o Google Scholar começou a indexar o SciELO, o tráfico aos sites SCIELO aumentou de forma extraordinária, o que mudou tudo. O aumento contribuiu, de forma significativa, para suplantar a resistência que os editores tinham em relação à publicação online. Google Scholar mostrou aos publicadores, editores, autores e usuários que a publicação online era o novo paradigma para a disseminação de periódicos, e que o SciELO poderia ajudar a atingi-lo. O processo estabelecido pelo SciELO para criar versões estruturadas dos artigos e metadados, assim como a estandardização da formatação do artigo foram componentes-chave para o rápido sucesso do esforço de indexação.

Quarto, o sucesso e crescente aumento do uso do SciELO, aliado ao controle de qualidade dos periódicos, levou os sistemas nacionais de avaliação de pesquisa a incluir o SciELO como um índice nos seus critérios de avaliação. Isso favoreceu o aumento da submissão de manuscritos aos periódicos indexados, o que provocou um impulso adicional ao programa.

O outro objetivo em desenvolvimento do SciELO é o aumento do impacto da pesquisa comunicada por seus periódicos. Uma condição chave para isso é identificar e contabilizar as citações aos periódicos e artigos SciELO. SciELO computa indicadores bibliométricos abarcando os periódicos que hospeda. Para mensurar o impacto de forma mais abrangente, o SciELO contou inicialmente com o Web of Science (WoS) e Scopus. Entretanto, estes índices têm cobertura incompleta dos periódicos SciELO. Por exemplo, em 2014 a Scopus cobre 70% dos periódicos do SciELO Brasil e a WoS apenas 36%. Para resolver parcialmente esta falta de cobertura, SciELO celebrou um acordo com a Thomson Reuters para incluir, a partir de 2014, o SciELO Citation Index na plataforma WoS, que provê uma cobertura mais ampla, principalmente nas ciências físicas e da vida.

Entretanto, o Google Scholar tem uma maior cobertura mundial, sobretudo em ciências sociais e humanidades. Como resultado, Scholar Metrics oferece números de citação mais abrangentes. Estes estão sendo agora usados pelo SciELO para avaliar a influência mais ampla de seus periódicos. Scholar Metrics também é parte fundamental do processo de avaliação de novos periódicos que desejem ingressar em SciELO. Neste sentido, o que realmente gostaríamos de ter no Scholar Metrics seria a disponibilidade de séries anuais de indicadores, e a extensão do ranking de periódicos para além de 100.

SciELO e Google Scholar caminharam juntos um longo percurso. Juntos, nós temos ajudado a aumentar a visibilidade mundial dos periódicos da América Latina, bem como de Portugal, Espanha e África do Sul. Em seu aniversário, gostaríamos de parabenizar a equipe do Scholar pelo notável desenvolvimento do Google Scholar, um serviço de busca abrangente com que muitas mentes brilhantes outrora apenas sonharam. Vida longa ao Google Scholar!

Source: Google Scholar Blog

The second article in our 10th Anniversary Series is by Abel Packer. He is the director of the SciELO Program which has transformed scholarly publishing in Latin America. Given SciELO's multi-lingual reach, this post appears in English, Portuguese and Spanish. - Anurag Acharya.

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SciELO, Google Scholar y las revistas de América Latina

SciELO tiene 16 años de edad. Hoy día publica aproximadamente mil revistas seleccionadas arbitradas en acceso abierto agrupadas en colecciones nacionales. La Red SciELO actualmente se compone de 16 colecciones nacionales, 13 de América Latina así como Portugal, España y Sud África.

El objetivo principal de SciELO es proporcionar visibilidad y crecimiento sostenible a la investigación comunicada por las revistas publicadas a nivel nacional. Cuando se lanzó SciELO, estas revistas eran solamente impresas con una base pequeña de suscriptores. Solamente unas pocas revistas estaban indexadas en los índices de citas y no había manera de determinar el impacto real o potencial que tenían la mayoría de las revistas en sus campos respectivos.

Hoy, estimamos en alrededor de un millón de descargas de artículos al día a través de la red, 500 mil de ellas (basadas en estadísticas compatibles con COUNTER) de SciELO Brasil. El número total de artículos alojados en la Red SciELO pasa de los 450 mil.

¿Cómo es que SciELO tuvo éxito en establecer una operación tan amplia y lograr un desempeño tan impresionante en términos de descargas? ¿Por qué tantos países y revistas se unieron a la Red SciELO?

Hay cuatro factores principales. En primer lugar, la reputación y liderazgo de las organizaciones de conducción. El proyecto SciELO fue fundado y mantenido por la Fundación de Investigación de San Pablo (FAPESP), ampliamente conocida en Brasil como la agencia de investigación más eficaz y avanzada en el país, y el Centro Latinoamericano y del Caribe en Información en Ciencias de la Salud (BIREME), que está afiliada a la Organización Panamericana de la Salud y la OMS. La motivación inicial de la asociación fue desarrollar un índice de citaciones que abarcara una colección más completa que las 17 revistas que entonces eran indexadas en el Journal of Citation Reports del ISI. Poco después del lanzamiento, la Comisión Nacional chilena para la Investigación en Ciencia y Tecnología (CONICYT) se unió al esfuerzo. A partir de 2002, el Consejo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico de Brasil (CNPq) y otras agencias nacionales de investigación también empezaron a apoyar a SciELO.

En segundo lugar, los criterios selectivos de aceptación aplicados a las revistas de las colecciones SciELO. Solamente fueron aceptadas revistas arbitradas de acceso abierto con un consejo editorial integrado por reconocidos investigadores, una tasa de rechazo razonable de manuscritos y estándares compatibles con los procesos de publicación. Las mejores revistas de Brasil fueron invitadas por la FAPESP a unirse a SciELO. CONICYT tomó un enfoque similar para SciELO Chile. Esto ayudó a establecer la expectativa de los criterios de aceptación selectivos para las nuevas colecciones nacionales.

En tercer lugar, el tremendo impacto de Google Scholar que fue decisivo en llevar adelante el programa. Tan pronto como Google Scholar comenzó a indexar SciELO el tráfico a los sitios SciELO aumentó en una cantidad tan extraordinaria que lo cambió todo. Este crecimiento contribuyó, en gran medida, a la superación de la resistencia que los editores tenían hacia la publicación en línea. Google Scholar mostró a las editoriales, editores, autores y usuarios, que la publicación en línea era el nuevo paradigma de la diseminación de revistas y que SciELO podría ayudar a lograrlo. Los procesos puestos en marcha por SciELO para crear versiones estructuradas de los artículos y metadatos, así como la estandarización del formato de artículo fueron componentes claves en el rápido éxito del esfuerzo de indexación.

En cuarto lugar, el éxito y el creciente uso de SciELO, junto con el control de calidad en las revistas, llevaron a los sistemas nacionales de evaluación de investigación a incluir a SciELO como un índice en sus criterios de evaluación. Esto favoreció en un aumento en la presentación de manuscritos a las revistas indexadas, que proporcionó un impulso adicional al programa.

El otro objetivo permanente de SciELO es aumentar el impacto de la investigación comunicada por sus revistas. Un requisito clave para esto es identificar y contar las citas a las revistas y artículos de SciELO. SciELO calcula indicadores bibliométricos que cubren las revistas que alberga. Para medir un impacto más amplio, SciELO en principio se basó en el Web of Science (WoS) y Scopus. Sin embargo, estos índices tienen una cobertura incompleta de las revistas SciELO. Por ejemplo, en 2014 Scopus cubre 70% de las revistas SciELO Brasil, y WoS solamente 36%.Para resolver parcialmente esta falta de cobertura, SciELO estableció un acuerdo con Thomson Reuters para incluir a partir del 2014 el SciELO Citation Index en la plataforma WoS que proporciona una cobertura más amplia, sobre todo en las ciencias físicas y biológicas.

Sin embargo, Google Scholar tiene una cobertura más amplia en todo el mundo, más aún en las ciencias sociales y las humanidades. Como resultado, Scholar Metrics ofrece números de citas más completos. Estos son ahora usados por SciELO para evaluar la influencia más amplia de sus revistas. Scholar Metrics es también una parte clave del proceso de evaluación de las nuevas revistas que desean formar parte de SciELO. En este sentido, nos gustaría mucho disponer en Scholar Metrics las series anuales de indicadores y que se extendieran más allá de la posición 100.

SciELO y Google Scholar han recorrido juntos un largo camino. Juntos, hemos ayudado a aumentar significativamente la visibilidad mundial de las revistas de América Latina así como Portugal, España y Sud África. En su aniversario, nos gustaría felicitar al equipo Académico por el desarrollo impresionante de Google Scholar, un servicio de búsqueda exhaustivo que muchas mentes dotadas alguna vez solamente lo soñaron. ¡Larga vida a Google Scholar!

Source: Google Scholar Blog

Every now and then, we hear someone say, “Scholar never changes!” We, of course, know otherwise. But we do understand how it can be hard to notice gradual changes in someone you spend a lot of time with. To give you a bit of a peek behind the curtain, here are some of the changes that we have rolled out recently.

Author profiles

The citation histogram on the profile page can now be expanded to show  a larger and more detailed version when you click on it.  It's also available on phones and tablets - click on the "Citation indices" header to show the graph on smaller screens.  The citation histogram on each article's page can now be scrolled to display the entire range of years.

The "Follow" button on a public profile is now gray when you're already following the author.  It's still an inviting blue if you're not following them.

By popular demand, we've reinstated the "Articles 1-20" marker on the author profile pages, to help navigate a long list of publications.  This is automatically updated as you expand the list of articles or page back and forth.

Finally, we made it easier to close obsolete accounts.  You can now delete your Scholar account, without closing the entire Google account.  This is useful if you have accidentally created multiple author profiles.  You can delete your Scholar account from the "Account" tab on the Scholar settings page.

Search results

The links are now a darker blue, and the visited links a darker purple, to help readability.  We also removed the underlines, for a cleaner and more consistent look.

The "Cite" dialog is now a bit crisper  - we tightened the text and removed redundant options to save to my library and change the export format setting. The "Save" option still appears next to the "Cite" option under every search result; and the export format can still be selected on the settings page.

On the court opinions side, you can now share and bookmark links to specific pages.  Click on the page number in the margins or in the text, and copy or bookmark the URL with "#p123" at the end.

Source: Google Scholar Blog

Google Scholar will soon be 10 years old. It is amazing how time flies. Seems like it was just yesterday that Alex and I were scrambling to put everything in place for the launch. To help celebrate the anniversary, we have invited friends and colleagues in scholarly communication to share their thoughts. About Scholar, about scholarly communication and about future directions. These will appear in a 10th anniversary blog post series. The first post in the series is by John Sack, the founding director of HighWire Press. - Anurag Acharya

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Helping Researchers See Farther Faster

HighWire Press started at Stanford University almost 20 years ago -- we launched the Journal of Biological Chemistry Online in early 1995 -- about the same time that Google's founders were working in the same Stanford Quadrangle on the foundations for Google.  It took until 2002 to get our two efforts together and index HighWire-hosted scholarly articles in Google.  This project increased usage of the articles by one to two orders of magnitude, even though their abstracts had been fully indexed in PubMed right from the start. Two years later, in 2004, Google Scholar arrived.

In the twenty years since HighWire began, and in the ten years since Google Scholar beat a path to the door of scholarship, what have we achieved?   We know the answer to that question from interviews we did in 2002 and again in 2012-2014 with over sixty researchers.

Back in 2002, people still used the word "e-Journal" to describe the electronic version of a "print journal". Researchers told us they needed better ways to locate content across all the different sources of full-text – publisher sites each had their own separate search engines, and PubMed searched only abstracts.

We collectively solved that problem -- publishers took a big leap in providing the Google indexer with access to subscriber-only content.  So when HighWire asked Stanford researchers in 2012 interviews about the challenges of searching, they said:

   "Finding is easy..."
   ....but reading is hard."

We had so well-solved the search problem that people found more than they could handle. This wasn't just a relevance-ranking problem -- useless stuff showing up in search results. There was important material in those results and it needed to be evaluated to satisfy a researcher's sense of thoroughness.

Reading Faster

To “read” many articles in a short period of time, researchers want to be able to absorb the gist of an article quickly, and be able to judge its quality and relevance.  In our interviews with researchers, we heard strong support for adding visual abstracts to articles (as the American Chemical Society has been doing for years in all of its journals); for adding "take home messages" to articles indicating the significance of an article in the context of what is known and what the article adds (often found in clinical journals, like the BMJ, but now also appearing in basic-science journals such as PNAS and the JBC); and for a contextualized 'figure reading' experience (such as is found in the Lens viewer introduced in eLife).

All of these help researchers take in an article faster. None of these aids is available from Scholar search results, so readers must visit the sites where the full text is found. This “pogo-sticking” from search result to article and back and forth may seem normal and natural to us in the publishing industry. But as consumers we rely on Google showing augmented search results: if Google results stopped showing movie and restaurant “star” ratings, and restaurant price range “$$$” in its search results we’d think there was a bug!

How can Google Scholar meet this "read faster" challenge? How search evolves on this front will affect how researchers and publishers do their work of finding audiences.

Contextualization of References

One way to speed scholarly literature research would be to improve the “directedness” of search results -- don't just give me a list of articles, but give me or get me to paragraphs in context. Clearly Scholar knows the context for matching a query's criteria since it shows a snippet from the text.   Why not have Scholar and publisher sites collaborate a bit more to help readers get quickly from a result list to the first paragraph that matches a search, then on to the next matching paragraph, and so on.

And if Scholar can do that with search results, perhaps it can also help us with the too-arduous task of going from a citation embedded in an article, to the specific part of the cited article that is being referenced. Book references contain page numbers; why should journal articles be less specific?

Perhaps we can see how unhelpful this is by stepping out of our scholarly-publishing tradition and shifting to the consumer context: Imagine if a Google search provided you with a link to only the web site (i.e., home page) rather than to the specific page on a site that matched your search!  That's what we settle for with scholarly journal references.

Searching For Images

We know from researcher interviews that in some fields people don't start by reading the article text per se, they "read" the images and then look at the narrative around the images for context.  In some fields, figures tell the story -- just as in graphic novels and comic books, I suppose! -- and an article is figures woven together by text.   This isn’t only for disciplines that are visual in the traditional sense, but perhaps as true for equations in a physics article, structures in a chemistry article, or tables in a clinical-trial article.

So why not make it possible to search images by searching the figure legend, or text in a figure or table, or closed caption in a video. Google already provides a basic image search. Perhaps if publishers would provide Scholar with rights to display low-resolution article images – the visual equivalent of a snippet – we could have a scholarly version of image search.

There are great opportunities for innovation ahead of us. We will need to take some risks, build experiments and collaborate across boundaries between stakeholders. That’s what we have done for the past decade, and look how far we have come -- “finding is easy”!

Source: Google Scholar Blog

Summer's at an end… while the predictions of the much needed (in California) El Niño may or may not prove accurate, the season's ripe to put a fresh coat of paint on the Scholar Citations profiles.

We're rolling out a complete visual refresh, along with several usability improvements. Your publications are taking the center stage, while their aggregate citation metrics are moving to the sidebar. The "Follow" button is graduating to a more prominent spot, to make it easier for your fellow researchers to keep up with your latest articles. Working with a long list of publications is becoming more straightforward — you can load up to a thousand articles onto a page; and the "Merge", "Delete", and "Export" buttons always stay within easy reach on top of the screen.



The new modern profiles are easy to read on just about any device: 3-inch phones, 10-inch tablets, 24-inch desktops, and everything in-between. Really, everything. I gave it a spin on eight desktop browsers, two laptops, six phones, and three tablets. The new layout is more compact, especially on the smaller screens, and the controls are now larger and more finger-friendly. Just like in Scholar search.



We've also made it easier to print a nice, clean version of your profile. Your browser's "print" button now removes the sidebar and the controls, and prints just the list of articles with a brief summary header. Pro tip: to print more than twenty articles, click "Show more" at the bottom of the profile. If you wish to repeat the table header on top of every page, you'll need to use Firefox or Internet Explorer to print your profile; current versions of Chrome and Safari only print the header on the first page.



Needless to say, this is an excellent time to review your Scholar Citations profile, and make sure your information is up to date. Perhaps you have moved to another university? Or made a new homepage? Or maybe you've configured manual updates of your publications, and haven't had a chance to review the update emails for months? We haven't changed any entries as part of this visual refresh — nor did we change your metrics, I hope, — but if you haven't updated your Scholar profile for some time, it'd be great to give it a quick look.Three quarters of Scholar search results pages currently show links to the authors' public profiles. Chances are that someone's looking at yours too.

Source: Google Scholar Blog

Source: Google Scholar Blog

Today we’re launching Scholar Library, your personal collection of articles in Scholar. You can save articles right from the search page, organize them by topic, and use the power of Scholar's full-text search & ranking to quickly find just the one you want - at any time and from anywhere. You decide what goes into your library and we’ll provide all the goodies that come with Scholar search results - up to date article links, citing articles, related articles, formatted citations, links to your university’s subscriptions, and more. And if you have a public Scholar profile, it’s easy to quickly set up your library with the articles you want - with a single click, you can import all the articles in your profile as well as all the articles they cite. Click here and follow the instructions to get started.



Here’s how it looks. Click “Save” below a search result to save it to your library. Click “My library” to see all the articles in your library and search their full text. You can also use labels to organize your articles. To get you started we’ve created two labels, “My Citations” and “Cited by me”, based on your Scholar profile, if you have one. “My Citations” contains your profile articles and “Cited by me” contains articles you’ve cited. See our help page for more details.

We hope you enjoy your personal collection with all the Scholar goodies!

Posted by: James Connor, Software Engineer

Source: Google Scholar Blog

Scholar Metrics provide an easy way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications. Today, we are releasing the 2013 version of Scholar Metrics. This release covers articles published between 2008 and 2012.

Scholar Metrics include journal articles from websites that follow our inclusion guidelines, selected conference articles in Computer Science & Electrical Engineering and preprints from arXiv, SSRN, NBER, and RePEc. As in previous releases,  publications with fewer than 100 articles in 2008-2012, or publications that received no citations over this period are not included.

You can browse publications in broad areas like Chemical & Material Sciences, Physics & Mathematics, or Life Sciences & Earth Sciences as well as specific categories such as Computing Systems, Software Systems, Accounting & Taxation or Plasma & Fusion. You will see the top 20 publications in the area ordered by their five-year h-index and h-median metrics. To see which articles in a publication were cited the most and who cited them, click on its h-index number.

This release is based on citations from all articles that were indexed in Google Scholar as of mid-July 2013. Since the previous release was based on citations from all articles indexed as of mid-Nov 2012, which is quite a bit later in the calendar year, the new numbers are expected to be a bit lower. Rest assured that this does not indicate that your favorite journal has become less influential over this short period.

For more details, see the Scholar Metrics help page.

Posted by: Helder Suzuki, Software Engineer

Source: Google Scholar Blog

Source: Google Scholar Blog

Source: Google Scholar Blog