e-mail TOC alerts based on ticTOC’s

Published on January 7, 2010 in Library2.0. 0 Comments

At Wageningen UR Library we had for many years already a quite successful e-mail based TOC-alerting system for our users. It was introduced in 2003 (Gerritsma, 2003) and has been flourishing ever since. Why would we compete with publishers by offering TOC-alerts through the mail? The answer is quite simple. For each journal published by another publishers, the subscription process is different again. Requiring passwords and registrations. At the library website our users can subscribe in a uniform way to thousands of different TOC alerts.

The service has been rather popular. Our users have TOC alerts for more than 2000 different journals. We noticed in the referrals from our SFX server that the TOC alerts were in the top 10 of referring databases. Our researchers, teachers and students still prefer e-mail over RSS. So we have to offer both.

The old technique we used, was based on a subscription model from Swets (our journal intermediary). However, Swets did not deliver the best of services for this alerting service. We noticed very often considerable delays, and sometimes double alerts. There for enter the ticTOC project. We included the TOC service in our catalogue last year already, Peter described the technical bits and pieces here. Since this implementation we started thinking about the improvement of our TOC alerts.

Yesterday we received the first batch of TOC alerts in the mail based on the ticTOC service. We harvest for the journals that our users have TOC subscriptions for the RSS feeds from the publishers. Look at weekly of monthly intervals what has been added. The changes for those journals are send in an e-mail to the subscribers.

Advantageous of the RSS based system is that for some journals our TOC alerts are way earlier than those from the publisher. Springer is an example where the RSS feed runs over the online first articles, rather than the ‘printed’ issues. In my experience the RSS feed is 3 to 4 months ahead on the official TOC alerts. Furthermore we can now offer TOC alerts on a far more larger set of journals. And lastly, since it is a service that is entirely based on open data, we can offer this service now to our ‘external’ users as well.

We haven’t considered the last point officially yet. But the TOC alerts was a subscription service for our Wageningen UR employees only. Since we had to do we a subscription service from Swets. Now that it is an entirely open application we can offer the service in theory to any users. 

Transferring RSS feeds to e-mails sounds a bit silly, and not so Web 2.0, but when that’s what your users wants, you better provide that service.         

Literature

Gerritsma, W., Loman, M.E., 2003. Implementing portal functionality at wageningen ur library: Combining the old with the new. Online Information 2003, Olympia Grand Hall, London, UK, pp. 159-162. http://library.wur.nl/wasp/bestanden/LUWPUBRD_00321941_A502_001.pdf

Which master journal list do you prefer?

Published on July 9, 2009 in Databases. 0 Comments

A very useful resource which I need to consult, say, twice a year is master journal list of Thomson Reuters Scientific. This morning it was actully a colleage who needed this resource. Actually he wanted to know the journals covered by Web of Science. So he needed a subset of the Master Journal List. I knew that existsed but where?

Using Google we ended up on this version of the Master Journal List. Not the one I really wanted since it did not have the datase specific lists. I knew it existed but where? Only a couple of hours later, by approaching the site from a different angle, navigating around a wee bit more different I found the version of the Master Journal List, the version we were actually looking for.

Looking carefully I finally see that the first one is a more extensive journal search form of the Master Journal List. But that you can only find out after you’ve found the second website. You can navigate from the one to the other, but not the other way around. Little bit strange. Let alone confusing.

Actually in a similar vein. Thomson has a brand new product InCites, whereas the old totally different In-Cites website/product from the same company still exists.

The role of university rankings in university marketing

Published on July 8, 2009 in Scientometrics. 1 Comment

So far I did not notice any proper research on the role of university rankings in relation to university marketing. Of course, I am aware of many instances that the importance of university rankings have been mentioned in this respect, but evidence to substatiate these claims are rare.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised by the research of Liang-Hsuan Chen (2008) which only passed my screen today. She found that for Asian graduate students attending Canadian universities the rankings played an important role in university selection. She found:

Graduate students enrolled in professional programs ranked factors such as the ranking of the program and affordability of tuition with high importance in choosing a Canadian graduate school. The fact that the ranking of program was ranked with the highest importance by this group of students was in part due to the availability of program ranking information and marketing efforts (e.g., the MBA Tour) undertaken by the programs.

My impression from this piece of research, wether you like it or not, rankings do play their role in the perception and choice of international students in their selection of university to complete their graduate education. Rankings have different purposes Chen explains:

Reputational ranking became a proxy for the quality of education. Although much criticized by academics for its lack of both validity and reliability, reputational ranking serves three purposes: first, it is a promotional tool for higher education institutions to recruit students; second, it is an assessing tool for international students to screen out competitive choices; and third, it is a marketing and signaling tool for students themselves after they graduate.

So it’s not only important to be present in the various University rankings. You better make sure you rank well!

References
Chen, Liang-Hsuan (2008) Internationalization or International Marketing? Two Frameworks for Understanding International Students’ Choice of Canadian Universities, Journal of Marketing For Higher Education, 18(1): 1-33, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08841240802100113 (Subscription required)

Science redirect

Published on June 23, 2009 in Library2.0 and Uncategorized. 1 Comment

ScienceDirect screenshot from my Gphone

Yesterday I tried to follow a link from Twitter -courtesy to Janneke Staaks- to a reading suggestion. To na avail. It was a useful reading tip to an article on ScienceDirect. Well…. on a mobile phone with network access from a commercial operator that’s not going to work. Not yet, at least. So Elsevier and other publishers, are you ready for the mobile Web yet?

2008 Journal Citation Reports figures released

Published on June 22, 2009 in Databases. 1 Comment

Last Friday Thomson Reuters released the 2008 edition of the Journal Citation Reports. This year it was announced by Thomson itself as a news release, that’s a good move from them. The number of journals reported in the two editions of the JCR have increased from 6417 in the Science edition to 6598 (181 more journals that is) and in Social Sciences edition the number of journals covered increased from 1865 to 1980 (an increase of 115 journals).It is still not the increase I expected on the basis of the addition of some 750 new regional journals which was announced last year, and that figure is now even advertised as an expansion of 1228 journals, but it is still an expansion of 300 journals. Albeit reading Thomson’s press releases on the 2008 JCR update I still notice some juggling with numbers that don’t really add, or don’t make sense after simple investigations when comparing the 2007 and 2008 issues.Now we have to go and figure out which were added, and more important, which journal were dropped. That’s always interesting to find out. It will take time though.The really major improvement Thomson should make, is to abolish the rather odd division between the two parts of the database. Currently I can’t find any arguments to stick to the demarcation lines between the Science edition and the Social Science edition of the JCR. I really wonder how many customers they have that subscribe to only one part of the JCR. I think it is fair to assume that by far most of the customers subscribe to both parts.For teaching it is just a pain, to have to explain students that they should start their search with choosing a database part. That is far from intuitive.

World Bank 2.0

Published on April 13, 2009 in Science2.0. 0 Comments

Wikipedia als medicijn voor kennismanagementpijn

View more presentations from Edwin Mijnsbergen.

Thanks to ZBdigitaal I noted this presentation from World Bank staff, on the use of Wikipedia as a knowledge management system. Apart from the knowledge management side of the use of the Wikipedia for World Bank reports, it is a good initiative to expose the essence of kilometers of reports from the World Bank burocracy to a larger public.I wish I could encourage our researchers to make use of the Wikipedia more often. With to major objectives, to expose their ideas and findings to a larger public than acadmic peers only. Secondly to be prepared to participate in publica discussion on their theme of research with public stakeholders.Interesting move of the World Bank  

What’s inside In-Cites?

Published on March 13, 2009 in Databases. 0 Comments

The predecessor of Thomson Reuters Scientific has been responsible, for years already, for publishing the good old in-cites website. Today I was alerted on a new service by the same company. Incites?! A brand new product? Incites it is.

For me a bit confusing. Even today when I go to the old incites site a arrive here In-Cites. Okay. It carries the warning that the site has effecitvely moved to ScienceWatch.com. (In the unnoticable red bar at the top of the page). Fair enough. But the sole reason for me to use that website, or refer to in-cites is the journal lists. Follow the trail to the methdology section in Sciencewatch there you find a link to the journal list. With an additional click you end up here, where is stated:

The current Journal List is located on the archived in-cites.com Web site.

So you end up at in-cites.

What’s new at in-cites? Or what marketeer has thought up an old name from the same company for a new product?

I am interested in the new product, but at the moment I find it all a bit confusing.

Improving journal records in our catalogue

Published on March 13, 2009 in Library2.0. 2 Comments

As of today Wageningen UR library has integrated the RSS subscription options to the journal records in the catalogue. We borrowed these from the TicToc Project of JISC. Adding a relevant RSS option is not that much of an improvement. What is interesting about this whole issue how we finally ended up with the results from the RSS feeds. There were voices in favor to print the Table of Content article titles at the bottom of the record itself. Under the line so to say. Other voices thought that it would distract the users from the factual information presented in the record. So a compromise was struck.

Have a look at this record. The option of “show recent articles”  in the right hand screen will show the titles from the most recent issue.  In the TOC that shows at the bottom of the record, you can select the “show abstract” to view even more detail when that’s provided in the Feed.

Albeit an comprise, its a step in the right direction I think.

Open Access: Just Publish

Published on February 27, 2009 in Open Access and Uncategorized. 2 Comments

I do sincerely apologize for this boring video, a few talking heads is not the right medium to pass a message. An important message that is. But I couldn’t find any palatable alternatives on YouTube. Has nobody tried to make an attractive, short film on this subject?Anyway, a couple of bigshots from the Dutch University world passing the message on the importance of Open Access. They talk in Dutch, but this version has English sub-titles.

Bloggers are working for Google?

Published on February 27, 2009 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

Today an editorial of Nature stressed -yet again- the importance for scientists to blog about their research  (and what’s more, that editorial is freely available on-line). I can’t agree more and I do try to follow some Dutch scientists that blog -parts of- their research. Quite a succesful example is Lilia Efimova who’s about to finish her PhD, the other example is Anne Helmond who is just on the brink of starting her PhD research.

Today Anne had a post that really did make me wonder. In her post of Anne is… for which she apperently searched in Google, which should actually read Anne Helmond is…The first hit is

  • Lovink stresses that the Main object of research Anne Helmond is working on is that bloggers start to realize they are ‘working for google’ and contributing …

Which statement really amazes me. Certainly for social scientists. If the research question was phrased differently, such as “are Bloggers (really) working for Google?”, then it was a valid  research question. But if the research question is stated as it is, it takes me actually by surprise. Value free research? I know that sounds idealistic, but we have to keep up to some ideals.

The facts are, that certainly on my Dutch blog I have build an audience for whom I am writing. Combined with the direct visitors they combine for half of the blog visitors. And yes indeed, the other 50% of the visitors, do stop by because of maily Google. And they are more than wellcome.