The first issue of the Code4Lib Journal is online. It is an very interesting Open Acces Journal. I first noted it at Ken Varnum’s RSS4Lib blog. Ken is on the editorial board of this journal. Don’t think it is a journal for techies only, even I as a none programmer found plenty interesting stuff to read in the inaugural issue, like beyond OPAC 2.0, on the future of the library catalog system. It is exactly one of those articles that fully addresses the focal point of their mission statement: “the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future.” If they adhere to that statement, I am sold.
The articles in this first issue of Code4Lib Journal (C4LJ) are:
- Editorial Introduction — Issue 1, by Jonathan Rochkind
- Beyond OPAC 2.0: Library Catalog as Versatile Discovery Platform, by Tito Sierra, Joseph Ryan, and Markus Wust
- Facet-based search and navigation with LCSH: Problems and opportunities, by Kelley McGrath
- The Rutgers Workflow Management System: Migrating a Digital Object Management Utility to Open Source, by Grace Agnew & Yang Yu
- Communicat: The Next Generation Catalog That Almost Was…, by Ross Singer
- Connecting the Real to the Representational: Historical Demographic Data in the Town of Pullman, 1880-1940, by Andrew H. Bullen
- BOOK REVIEW: The Success of Open Source by Steven Weber, reviewed by Eric Lease Morgan
- COLUMN: 700 Dollars and a Dream : Take a Chance on Koha, There’s Very Little to Lose, by BWS Johnson
Tomorrow I will give a brief presentation on the outcomes of a citation analysis exercise we did for a chairgroup at our university a while back. I share this presentation since I contains some tips on publishing which some might find useful.
Today it was announced that institute disambiguation, or the affiliation identifier, will become functional in Scopus early January 2008. At this promotional site it is demonstrated what a search for the University of Liverpool returns in options of selection the right University of Liverpool and whether or not you want to include the teaching hospitals in a subsequent search as well.
Web of Science already included a refine option with an affiliation option amongst others, but they way the results are presented for Scopus shows that Elsevier has taken a different approach to solving this problem.
It will be interesting to test both approaches in more detail when the Scopus tool is officially launched.
Tomorrow, I am about to give a course on citation analysis for research evaluation. This powerpoint is the mainstay for the morning, but the course is open to any suggestions. It differs only in little details from the course given at the start of this year. The most exciting change came from Scimago, which I only discovered yesterday but has already been included in the exercises.
I knew it was coming, today I noted it for the first time that Scopus is already indexing and alerting ‘articles in press’ (or any of its variations such as ‘online first’). In one of my regular alerts I got this article from Henk Moed:
Moed, H.F. (2007) UK Research Assessment Exercises: Informed judgments on research quality or quantity? Scientometrics, pp. 1-9. Article in Press
Sometimes you find these real gems. WoW, fantastic.
This evening I had this exciting feeling when I saw SJR for the first time. Tipped of by Recherchen Blog I stumbled upon Scimago. A database that provides a plethora of bibliometric indicators for journals and research performance at a country level. They have developed their own Pagerank (from Google) type of indicator for journal ranking called SJR indicator. But the data they provide is much more than only this indicator. Articles, citations and citations per article are provided as well.
This database is based on data provided by Scopus, which covers a much larger dataset than Journal Citation Reports or the Essential Science Indicators from Thomson Scientific. Very interesting to observe that SJR is freely available on the Web. This is a new development in the competition that is taking place between the two publishing giants Elsevier and Thomson.
The information contained in SJR is so overwhelming that it will take some time before I fully comprehend the possibilities of this database. To understand the new indicators and to make comparisons with the old established databases. The systems provides really nice graphics for journal data as well. The makers of SJR are really serious about their research, they recently published a study in Scientometrics some of their analyses with this database -on my pile of stuff to read-.
Noted some mention of SJR at Sidi and DigitalKoans as well. In the Spanish blogosphere the rumour has been spreading for some time already.
This database will certainly be covered in more detail at a later date.
Literature:
Moya-Anegón, F. d., Z. Chinchilla-Rodríguez, B. Vargas-Quesada, E. Corera-Álvarez, F. J. Muñoz-Fernández, A. González-Molina & V. Herrero-Solana (2007). Coverage analysis of Scopus: A journal metric approach. Scientometrics 73(1): 53-78. http://www.scimago.es/file.php?file=/1/Documents/CoverageScopus07.pdf
When you work on a nearly daily basis with the products of Thomson ISI and have developed a love and hate relationship with the databases you sieve all information on these products you can find. It was therefore a welcome interview with Keith MacGregor, executive VP of Thomson’s academic and government strategic business unit, and James Testa, senior director, editorial development and publisher relations for Thomson that Nancy K. Herther published in the last issue of the Searcher (not free on-line).
The interview itself was rather too nice, the interviewer was perhaps too polite to raise really sensitive subjects. The parting thoughts listed by Herther at the end of the interview were the most interesting points of the whole article. A real pity that the two executives did not have a change to formulate their opinions on those points. In addition to the parting thoughts listed by Herther I would have loved to hear the opinion of these two gentleman on the stubborn ISI/Thomson Scientific policy not to change anything of the data collected in WoS. This results in all kind of inconsistencies in journal and author names when these are subject of study for a longer time period. I have the feeling that they try and correct some of the data in the software environment, but when you have to deal with the output as an analyst or collection development librarian, you end up with a load of data inconsistencies.
Only a few days ago I had to look into the citedness of T.B. van Wimersma Greidanus who published between 1969 and 1996. Impressive publication list, but really difficult to collect all those 300+ references from the cited ref search. For journal titles I have blogged already on this subject before and even before.
According to a few, Thomson is opening up a bit. However Herther wrote “I read a great deal of the published criticisms of citation data used for ranking individuals and institutions. I was therefore surprised at the absence of Thomson Scientific’s voice in many of these debates”. Which confirms my impression. But then again, perhaps times they are a-changin’.
reference
Herther, N. K. (2007). Thomson Scientific and the citation indexes : an interview with Keith MacGregor and James Testa. Searcher 15(10): 8-17.
In cites just published an overview of the top ranking countries for science over all fields. The report is based on the Essential Science Indicators it is therefore based on the past 10 years of publication and citation data collected from the Thomson ISI covered journals.
The first two tables rank the countries by accumulated citations and published papers. Most interesting however is the third table in which the countries are ranked on citations per paper. After omitting the smallest countries from that list we see that Switzerland (14.32 cpp) is leading the list followed by USA, Denmark and Netherlands just in the 4th postion with 12.85 cpp. Scotland, Sweden England, Finland, Canada and Belgium complete the top 10.
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