The next article in our 10th Anniversary Series is by Prof. Jonathan Eisen. He is at the University of California, Davis with appointments in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology in the School of Medicine and the Department of Evolution and Ecology in the College of Biological Sciences. His research focuses on communities of microbes and how they provide new functions – to each other or to a host. He is coordinating the largest microbial sequencing project to date – a Genomic Encyclopedia – being done at the DOE Joint Genome Institute where he holds an Adjunct Appointment. He is also an active and award-winning blogger and microblogger.-- Anurag Acharya

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Using Google Scholar in Scholarly Workflows

Jonathan Eisen
School of Medicine & College of Biological Sciences, UC Davis
When Anurag Acharya asked me recently if I would be interested in writing a guest post for the Google Scholar blog in relation to the 10th anniversary of Google Scholar, I immediately responded "Yes." Literally, that was the full content of my email response to his request. Why did I answer so enthusiastically? Well, I can put this down to three main reasons:

• I have always been interested in methods of scholarly communication but much more so recently as I am working on two projects on the topic (one to run the "microbiology of the Built Environment network" or microBEnet and the other to co-run the UC Davis "Innovating Communication in Scholarship" project.
• In the last 10 years Google Scholar has become a central part of my daily scholarly workflow
• I kind of like to blog (for example see my Tree of Life blog, my posts on the microBEnet blog, and my posts on the ICIS blog)

So - in thinking about what to write for this post, I came up with three main topics I thought would be good to cover - how I got interested in topics of searching for and sharing scholarly papers, how I use Google Scholar, and some ideas about future possible uses of Google Scholar.

Part 1: Some Background

One day, in ancient history, my wife came home from work (at a biotech startup up focusing on bioinformatics) raving about this new search engine "Google" that people at her company were talking about. As someone who thought of himself as on the cutting edge of web technology, I was a bit dismayed that I had not somehow discovered this myself. But I got over that and tried it out. And, after searching for my name (and being impressed with how well this new search engine worked on such an important topic) I immediately started playing around with searching for scientific papers and data. I did this, I guess, because ever since I was in college, I had been becoming more and more interested in (or some would say obsessed with) issues relating to finding and sharing scientific knowledge.

Without going into too much detail, some of the factors that contributed to my obsession included:

• Working as a shelver and then assistant in the Museum of Comparative Zoology library in college and seeing how people struggled to find papers of relevance to their work;
• Spending many years in graduate school (in the 1990s) working on projects that had been largely unstudied since the 1960s, including one (so called adaptive mutation) where researchers claimed to have discovered something new in the 1990s but had in fact missed a rich literature on the topic from the 1950s and 1960s (e.g., see this from 1955).
• Building and sharing databases where I was trying to include a description of every paper that had been published about specific genes. I note - thanks to the Wayback machine my Stanford website from when I was a PhD student is still available - although alas the specific linked databases are not. I have reposted some of them for people to see what they were like (though many of the links in them are busted). See for example my sites on RecA, SNF2, MutS and more
• Working on projects to catalog everything known about specific organisms in association with work I was doing to characterize the genomes of these organisms

In these and other projects, I had seen and experienced just how much time could be spent on searching for papers and data about a particular topics. I am not sure I had a well-defined strategy in every case but I came to rely upon some preferred methods including:

• "Citation walking" where one takes a paper of interest and then asks "how has this paper been cited?” and traverses across the literature via citations
• Searching for keywords in abstracts and titles
• Browsing through specific journals
• Looking for papers by specific authors
• For data, I mostly would look in specific centralized data repositories such as Genbank for DNA sequence information and PDB for three-dimensional structural data on proteins.

And of course many other approaches. Nothing really novel or brilliant here though I do think I got pretty good at how to carry out such searches. But one of the challenges was each approach had to be done in a different system and some of the systems were only available for a fee and some were not even online. And even with lots of time and pain, many things could be missed.

Thus when my wife introduced me to this new fangled Google thing my thoughts rapidly turned to - how can I use this new tool to help in finding and then sharing scientific papers or data about these genes and organisms I was studying? Did Google searches solve all my "issues" in this regard? Alas, no. But jump forward ~15 years to today and I am quite amazed in retrospect how much of my scholarly workflow flows through Google Scholar. But rather than try to recall and write about how my workflow changed with the advent of Google Scholar I thought I would just jump to the present time and discuss some ways that I use Google Scholar now.

Part 2: Using Google Scholar today

When working on this post I started to look around at how I use Google Scholar and I confess I was amazed at how many different ways I use it in my work. Here are some examples:

Tracking and using citations. One major general use of Google Scholar lies in tracking of citations to specific scholarly works. Here are some ways that I use such information:

• Citations to individual works. A key aspect of scholarly work in many fields is examining how specific works are cited. Such information has many uses include discovering new works on a topic by seeing how specific papers from the past are cited, assessing impact of works, ego satisfying, and more. For many years, information on how a specific work was cited was nearly impossible to come by without paying for access to citation tracking databases. Now, with Google Scholar I (and others) can very rapidly gather such information.
• Citation from diverse sources. One aspect of using Google Scholar to track citations to individual works is the way GS finds citations in diverse sources – not just in the peer reviewed scholarly literature. Now, in some ways this can be viewed as a limitation (some may not want to count or even know about citations from self published white papers, for example). But in others ways this is a wonderful thing as one can find citations to one’s work from very diverse sources outside of the “normal” mold.
• Citation metrics. It is not a large conceptual leap to go from the ability to track citations to individual works to the ability to create summary statistics about citations across many works. There are many indices for such purposes – some useful and some not. But whatever you think of such indices – Google Scholar has opened up the ability for people to calculate such metrics for oneself or to offer services to calculate metrics for others. Such indices can be used in many ways but perhaps the most common is to summarize the citations for one individual researcher. Which leads into my next topic …

Google Scholar Pages. Perhaps my favorite development from Google Scholar in the last 10 years has been the introduction of Google Scholar Pages for individuals. I make use of my Google Scholar page and pages of others for dozens of things including these:

• Citation metrics for myself. See above for a discussion of citation metrics in general. I use Google Scholar pages to examine citation metrics for myself and my papers all the time (right now GS shows two summary statistics H-index and I-10 index). And I use this information in many ways including putting it on my CV, including it in grant reports, and examining which of my scholarly works have had more “impact”.
• As landing page for my publication list. Once one has a GS page, GS automatically adds new publications to one’s list and also updates citation counts and other information regularly. Thus I now include a link to my GS page on my blogs, my work web sites, and in my email signature.
• To keep track of my coauthors. I have been blessed (and perhaps a bit cursed) to work in a field (genomics) where many projects involve large-scale collaborations across many institutions, involving many researchers. And I have found that a nice way to track these coauthors is via GS (although – note to GS folks – there used to be a way to show, publically, all coauthors in a list but I cannot seem to figure out how to do this anymore).
• Author disambiguation. For people like myself with a relatively unique name, when others search for my scholarly works, they are pretty easy to find (although I note the fact that there is another Jonathan Eisen out there who publishes some works with a bit of a conspiracy theory angle has been both good and bad for me at times). But for many others, their name is not a perfect way to find their work. This may be because they have a name that is relatively common, or it may be because they have changed their name (e.g., after marriage). For such people creating a GS page can be very useful because once one trains GS with a set of works, it can find new works by that same person quite well (I first found out about this author disambiguation by GS when Anurag gave a talk at a meeting I organized last year). GS is certainly not the only tool in author disambiguation and others – like author UIDs (e.g., ORCID) are almost certainly better long term options. I note – author disambiguation may seem like a esoteric topic to many but it has major implications on important issues such as gender equity in academia, since women are much more likely to change their names during their career than men are.
• Automated updates of new papers by specific authors. One option associated with GS author pages I use extensively is the ability to “follow” specific authors and get notified of new publications of theirs.
• To keep track of a collection of people. Most researchers do not regularly update their individual publication pages on their websites. However, if those researchers have GS pages one can keep track of their new papers quite easily (either by the follow option mentioned above or just by browsing occasionally). For example, for my microBEnet project I curate a list of GS pages for researchers in the whole field with connections to studies of “microbiology of the built environment” and thus (hopefully) help others keep up with what is going on in the field.
• Who is in a specific field? One feature of GS author pages that is not used a lot as far as I can tell, but which has some value is the “areas of interest” tag one can add to one’s profile. Though not everyone uses such tags, I have found they are a useful tool in finding researchers working on specific topics. For example, I list “symbiosis” as one of my areas of interest and if I click on the link for that on my page I get a list (sorted by citation counts – which is both useful and annoying) of others who have listed that same area of interest. And many of the people in this list I am not familiar with yet they do work on topics in which I am very interested.

Automated discovery of new papers by topic. Pretty much all scholars these days are drowning in information and in keeping up with scholarly works. There are many reasons for this of course, and there are also some solutions. I find, for example, that social media is a great way to keep up to date on what new papers are coming out or have come out recently. But social media does not find everything and as someone who is responsible for keeping others up to date on various fields (e.g., this is one of my jobs at microBEnet) I also rely on both manual and automated searchers of the scholarly literature to find new papers or old papers I have missed. GS has two key ways to help in this regard. The first is relatively simple in concept but takes advantage of the power of Google indexing – which is just directly searching GS for papers on particular topics. And the advanced search options allow some customization of such searches. But as someone who is quite busy, I do not actually end up searching GS for new papers all that often. Instead I rely upon automated searches through various services including Pubmed, Pubchase, and GS. I use GS in two ways for such automated searches:

• Create an alert. When one does a search on GS, in addition to results one is presented with an option to “Create an alert”. I now have dozens of such alerts in operation. To avoid getting drowned by the results I set them up to send only once a week and I filter them into a separate mail folder that I only look at when I have time. But I frequently find interesting new papers this way.
• GS Updates. Another option now available, if one has a GS profile, is to use the GS Updates system (which I have written about before here and here for example). This system uses one’s publication list to scan for new papers that are related in some way to one’s prior work.

Many other uses of GS. I have gone on perhaps way too long here so I am only going to briefly mention a few other uses of GS.

• Finding online versions of papers. Unquestionably one of the most valuable uses of GS is to find online versions of scholarly works. But since others have written extensively about this I will just say the following: if you publish any scholarly work I recommend you make it freely and openly available AND that you make sure that it gets indexed by GS.
• Full text searches of the literature. Another critically important aspect of GS is that it facilitates full text searching of the scholarly literature which is important for many reasons.
• Finding works outside of the “normal” places to publish. Another key feature of GS is that it indexes much more than just publisher’s sites. If one posts a preprint on one’s own web server, that paper may show up in GS (which I think is a good thing). GS also indexes many diverse sources of scholarly works and thus helps in finding works that may otherwise not see the light of day.
  

Part 3: Where do we go from here?

As an active user of Google Scholar I of course have many comments, complaints, ideas and thoughts about what it could do better and where it might go in the future. And there are SO many things that could be added or improved upon – things like better figure and table searching, better exporting of information, better abilities to curate and create collections and to then use such collections as training sets for automated searchers, and more and more and more. I have written about some such issues and suggestions from time to time in my blog (see for example, this and this and this). There is certainly lots of work to be done.

But in thinking about this I realized that making a list of issues and suggestions is only of limited value. What I think GS really needs is a better public forum where GS can discuss what their plans are for the future and also where users and developers can discuss what they would find useful. And though I see some places for such discussions on the Google Scholar blog and in related sites, I don’t see a lot. So – I would like to end with a call for GS to create a better site for such discussions of the future of GS …

Source: Google Scholar Blog

The next article in our 10th Anniversary Series is by Thomas Bruce. He is the director of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell. He co-founded the LII in 1992. Today, its legal collections are used widely and have inspired the Free Access to Law Movement which has helped citizens worldwide learn about the laws that govern them. Thomas is also the author of Cello, first Web browser for Microsoft Windows. -- Anurag Acharya

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Caselaw is Set Free, What Next?

Thomas Bruce, Director, Legal Information Institute, Cornell

A lawyer story

Google Scholar’s caselaw collection is a victory for open access to legal information and the democratization of law. It would be more than worthy of celebration from that standpoint alone. But caselaw is above all an obsession of lawyers, and I’d like to start by telling the tale from their point of view.

Five years ago, when Google Scholar added judicial opinions to its portfolio, it created an immediate sensation among lawyers. Small-office and solo practitioners were the most vocal about it; they had always had a difficult time affording the services of commercial publishers, even in print. And now there was access to a significant chunk of material that had previously been lodged firmly behind paywalls. It was linked and searchable, and still better, it offered a version of the citation-tracking and evaluation features that lawyers knew and loved in expensive commercial systems. It had first-class sorting and filtering features. It had Bluebook-form citations for each case (pretty much the epitome of something that nobody but lawyers knows or cares about, but a very thoughtful touch indeed). Nobody in the open-access arena had tried such a thing, and probably only Google could have. One commentator said that, “Google fired (arguably) the loudest...salvo in the battle for free access to caselaw… and it apparently came as a tweet”.

Scholar’s immediate impact on the legal profession was owed in large part to its technical virtuosity. It was an unusual display of ingenuity used to democratize services and features whose value had mostly been known only to lawyers. But, for the legal profession, it was happening in the middle of a long-brewing, near-perfect storm. Since at least the early 90’s, clients had complained about surcharges that law firms added to legal research costs. By 2000, there was growing refusal to reimburse legal-research fees at all; clients felt that the firm’s online charges were just a part of overhead, like water and electricity. That was not an isolated gripe; rather, it was a visible crack in abusiness model that we now know had been eroding for quite some time. By one estimate, the 2008 implosion of the financial-services industry destroyed over a third of the legal employment in New York. A lot of firms changed radically or disappeared altogether in the aftermath. You could talk, in dry academic terms, about downward price pressure on the industry. One suspects that the feeling was more like riding in an elevator whose cables had been cut.

There had been free offerings of caselaw online for some time, starting with a BBS system offered by the Cleveland Freenet in 1989; the first web-based effort started here at Cornell in 1992, and was followed with a full edition of all Federal statutes in 1994. Elsewhere -- notably in Canadaand Australia -- open-access systems offered by third parties had evolved into the de facto national standard. And government was catching up, with many law creators publishing their materials online, for free.

Free services had never been the first choice of lawyers in the US. Some of the reasons were rational -- free services often lacked features that lawyers depend on, most provided very little in the way of commentary or annotation, and in any case they were highly distributed. There was no “one-stop shopping” in the world of open access to law, just a lot of websites offering different collections. The irrational reasons were, if anything, even more interesting and far more influential, though much more deeply buried in lawyer psyches. Lawyers are notoriously conservative in their work methods, and many law librarians even more so. Anything that was both new and noncommercial was inherently suspect. And the commercial services had had more than a century to reinforce the idea that size and comprehensiveness were the only measures of quality that mattered.

Even so, it’s hard to convey the degree to which lawyers mistrust distributed systems. As John Lederer once remarked, “Lawyers don’t buy books -- they buy systems of books”, and so it was with electronic products as well. It was easy for lawyers to dismiss what they saw as isolated pockets of legal information offered by volunteers at wildly different levels of added value, and marketers of commercial services had been quick to emphasize these qualities. That said, in the year prior to the addition of caselaw to Scholar, Cornell’s website had delivered well over 81 million pageviews to nearly 14 million unique visitors. 4.5 million of those pageviews went to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a collection unlikely to be used by anyone but lawyers.

Comes now Google, a company with unparalleled capacity and legendary technical skills, offering a large collection of caselaw under one roof, with a workable citator and advanced search functionality. That was a big story, and it was oftenreported as “Google takes on commercial legal-research behemoths”. It was free access offered from a source that could not be dismissed as somehow beneath notice or unlikely to survive. Google’s offerings in Scholar thus became a validation of, and a capstone on, the things that open-access advocates had been doing for years. Apart from its inherent value -- which was, and is, huge -- it was a sign that freely accessible legal information was technically advanced and more than sufficient for many if not most professional needs. Most of all, it signaled that free legal information was something to be taken seriously. It sent that signal at a time when circumstances compelled the profession to pay far more attention than it otherwise might have. Scholar not only brought us a new and capable collection, it brought a new level and quality of attention to the entire open-access enterprise.

Everyone else

I began by telling a story about law and lawyers, but of course there’s an even more compelling story about law and everyone else. Laws -- and particularly statutes and regulations -- affect everybody. They describe what’s possible and permissible, what it costs to do business, what we can expect from government and what government can expect from us. On any given day, an open-access legal web site such as ours, or Scholar, is used by people who are helping veterans get the benefits to which they’re entitled, small businesses planning new courses of action, and students at all levels who are learning about the Constitution and our system of government. There are law-enforcement personnel learning about the limits and obligations of their position, hospital managers consulting public-benefits law, and people finding out what they have to do to sell new products in new markets. Those people need access to law. They need to be able to create starting points for themselves, using search to connect words and phrases that they already understand with concepts and explanations that at first they will not understand at all. They need to be able to follow their noses from those poorly-understood things to other pages that will explain them. Making all that possible is the next challenge.

What now?

Google Scholar’s caselaw collection offers features -- such as citators -- that are a step toward the “system of books” that would fully integrate primary legal sources and commentary into a practical resource for public understanding and professional practice. The legal-information ecosystem on the Web as a whole is moving in that direction. As that progresses, the benefits to everyone affected by law -- which is to say, everyone, period -- will be enormous. We will move beyond making law available on the Web to making it truly accessible on the Web -- not just discoverable, but understandable.

In 1992, starting with important caselaw collections, the open-access community began connecting law to itself. Hyperlinks gave readers a way to seamlessly follow citations -- at least if the cited thing was available online somewhere. And simply seeing to it that the things that ought to be online are online kept us all busy for a very long time (and is still a significant problem, in many places, some of them surprisingly close to home). We need to increase the density of connections between documents by making connections easier for machines (rather than human authors) to create. We need to hugely increase the amount of freely-available material that explains the law. And we need to -- in ways both trivial, and not -- make it possible for people to find the laws that affect them using things they already know.

Regulations provide a really good arena for thinking about such problems, for two reasons. First, they are harder for information systems to deal with. They are inconsistently drafted by a wide variety of people. For example, the Code of Federal Regulations is essentially a compilation of the work of perhaps 200 agencies (nobody really knows exactly how many). And, compared to caselaw, regulations have been relatively neglected by open-access publishers. Finally, and most importantly, they are the largest single contact surface between the public and the legal system. Yes, there are Supreme Court cases that are sweeping in their effect on daily life -- roughly half a dozen a year, compared to the thousands and thousands of cases in the Federal system that are just about two people suing two other people over something that only four people care about (and maybe a fifth if you count the judge). Regulations affect lots of people, and they change often. That makes them much more of a challenge for open-access publishers, both technically and economically. It also makes it that much more urgent to provide citizens with improved modes of access and value-added services such as notification of changes and anything and everything that would make compliance easier. Second, regulations are about things, and they are often based on science. And building things that bridge knowledge domains is what information scientists do.

A trivial example may help. Right now, a full-text search for “tylenol” in the US Code of Federal Regulations will find… nothing. Mind you, Tylenol is regulated, but it’s regulated as “acetaminophen”. But if we link up the data here in Cornell’s CFR collection with data in the DrugBank pharmaceutical collection , we can automatically determine that the user needs to know about acetaminophen -- and we can do that with any name-brand drug in which acetaminophen is a component. By classifying regulations using the same system that science librarians use to organize papers in agriculture, we can determine which scientific papers may form the rationale for particular regulations, and link the regulations to the papers that explain the underlying science. These techniques, informed by emerging approaches in natural-language processing and the Semantic Web, hold great promise.

All successful information-seeking processes permit the searcher to exchange something she already knows for something she wants to know. By using technology to vastly expand the number of things that can meaningfully and precisely be submitted for search, we can dramatically improve results for a wide swath of users. In our shop, we refer to this as the process of “getting from barking dog to nuisance”, an in-joke that centers around mapping a problem expressed in real-world terms to a legal concept. Making those mappings on a wide scale is a great challenge. If we had those mappings, we could answer a lot of everyday questions for a lot of people.

As I hinted earlier, search is often just the start; it shows the way to the trailhead, but the information-seeker must then follow a path that leads to commentary and deeper explanation of what the search engine offers easily. Building that path is a problem that rests critically on integration across multiple websites and collections. Metadata-publishing standards and linked-data approaches are helping; we look forward, for example, to a set of specific legal extensions to schema.org that will make it easier for people and machines to follow their noses from what search provides to the understanding that they really need. It will be a long job.

But that is a tale for another day, perhaps another ten years in the future. It’s exciting to see how far we’ve come. Scholar, and its legal collection, are a tremendous gift to those who want to know about the law, and a platform for those of us who want to go further.

Source: Google Scholar Blog

The world of scholarly communication has changed quite a bit over the last decade and Scholar has been a part of the change. We are taking the opportunity of Scholar's 10th anniversary to explore the impact of these changes - looking at how scholarship and citation patterns have changed as publications and archives moved online and comprehensive relevance-ranked search became available to everyone.

As the next article in the 10th anniversary series, we have published a study examining the evolution of the impact of non-elite journals on arXiv. The idea that a small elite set of journals covers most of the key papers in a discipline has long been prevalent in the study of scholarly communication. We explore how this has changed over 1995-2013. - Anurag Acharya

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Rise of the Rest: The Growing Impact of Non-Elite Journals

In this paper, we examine the evolution of the impact of non-elite journals. We attempt to answer two questions. First, what fraction of the top-cited articles are published in non-elite journals and how has this changed over time. Second, what fraction of the total citations are to non-elite journals and how has this changed over time.

To answer these questions, we studied citations to articles published in 1995-2013. We computed the 10 most-cited journals and the 1000 most-cited articles each year for all the 261 subject categories included in Scholar Metrics. We considered the 10 most-cited journals in a category as the elite journals for the category and all other journals in the category as non-elite.

There are two main conclusions from our study. First, the fraction of highly-cited articles published in non-elite journals increased steadily over 1995-2013. While the elite journals still publish a substantial fraction of high-impact articles, many more authors of well-regarded papers in a diverse array of research fields are choosing other venues.

Our analysis indicates that the number of top-1000 papers published in non-elite journals for the representative subject category went from 149 in 1995 to 245 in 2013, a growth of 64%. Looking at broad research areas, 4 out of 9 broad areas saw at least one-third of the top-cited articles published in non-elite journals in 2013. All broad areas of research saw a growth in the fraction of top-cited articles published in non-elite journals over 1995-2013. For 6 out of 9 broad areas, the fraction of top-cited papers published in non-elite journals for the representative subject category grew by 45% or more.

Second, now that finding and reading relevant articles in non-elite journals is about as easy as finding and reading articles in elite journals, researchers are increasingly building on and citing work published everywhere. Considering citations to all articles, the percentage of citations to articles in non-elite journals went from 27% of all citations in 1995 to 47% in 2013. Six out of nine broad areas had at least 50% of total citations going to articles published in non-elite journals in 2013.

Read on arXiv

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

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 and Latin American Journals

SciELO is 16 years old. Today, it publishes approximately one thousand selected peer-reviewed open access journals grouped into national collections. The SciELO Network currently comprises 16 national collections, 13 from Latin America and three from Portugal, Spain and South Africa.

The primary goal of SciELO is to provide growing visibility to the research published by national journals. When SciELO was launched these journals were print-only, usually with a small subscriber base. Only a few journals were indexed in citation indexes and there was no way of determining the real or potential impact that most of the journals had in their respective fields.

Today, we estimate about one million downloads a day across the network, 500 thousand of them from SciELO Brazil as based on COUNTER-compliant statistics. The total number of articles hosted across the SciELO Network is over 450 thousand.

Two important questions: how did SciELO succeed in setting up such a broad-based operation and achieve such an impressive performance in terms of downloads and why have so many countries and journals joined the SciELO Network?

There are four major factors. First, the reputation and leadership of the driving organizations. The SciELO project was established and nurtured by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), widely known in Brazil as the most efficient and advanced research agency in the country, and the Latin American and Caribbean Center in Health Sciences Information (BIREME), which is affiliated with the Pan American Health Organization and the WHO. The initial motivation for the partnership was to develop a citation index covering a more comprehensive collection of journals beyond the 17 which were then indexed in the Journal Citation Reports from ISI. Soon after launch, the Chilean National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT) joined the effort. From 2002 on, the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and other national research agencies started also to support SciELO.

Second, the selective acceptance criteria applied to journals for SciELO collections. Only open access peer-reviewed journals with an editorial board composed of well-known researchers, a reasonable rejection rate of manuscripts and standards-compliant publication processes were accepted. The best journals of Brazil were invited by FAPESP to join SciELO. CONICYT took a similar approach for SciELO Chile. This helped set the expectation of selective acceptance criteria for new national collections.

Third, the tremendous impact of Google Scholar which was decisive in moving the program ahead. As soon as Google Scholar began indexing SciELO, the traffic to SciELO sites increased to such an extraordinary extent that the general panorama was completely changed. The dramatic growth contributed, in a major way, to overcome the resistance that publishers had towards online publication. Google Scholar showed publishers, editors, authors and users that online publication was the new paradigm for the dissemination of journals and that SciELO could help them to achieve it. The processes put in place by SciELO to create structured versions of the articles and metadata, as well as standardization of article formatting were a key component in the rapid success of the indexing effort.

Fourth, the success and the increasing use of SciELO, together with quality control on the journals, led national research evaluation systems to include SciELO as an index in their evaluation criteria. This favored an increase in manuscript submissions to indexed journals, which provided an additional impetus to the program.

The other ongoing objective of SciELO is to increase the impact of the research communicated by its journals. A key requirement for this is to identify and count citations to SciELO journals and articles. SciELO computes bibliometric indicators covering the journals it hosts. To measure broader impact, SciELO initially relied on Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. However, these indexes have an incomplete coverage of SciELO journals. For example, in 2014 Scopus covers 70% of the journals in SciELO Brazil, and WoS only 36%. To partially solve this lack in coverage, SciELO concluded an agreement with Thomson Reuters to include, as of 2014, the SciELO Citation Index in the WoS platform which provides a wider coverage, particularly in the physical and life sciences.

However, Google Scholar has much broader coverage worldwide, even more so in social sciences and humanities. As a result, Scholar Metrics offers more comprehensive citation numbers. These are now used by SciELO to evaluate the broader influence of its journals. Scholar Metrics are also a key part of the evaluation process for new journals that want to become part of SciELO. In this regard, what we would really like in Scholar Metrics is the availability of an annual series of indicators, and extending the journal rankings beyond 100.

SciELO and Google Scholar have walked a long way together. Together, we have helped to significantly increase the worldwide visibility of Latin American journals and journals of Portugal, Spain and South Africa. On its anniversary, we would like to congratulate the Scholar team for the impressive development of Google Scholar, a comprehensive search service that many gifted minds once only dreamed of. Long live 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

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