Archive for March, 2008

PubMed sucks, or the user is broken

Published on March 24, 2008 in Databases and Information Retrieval. 11 Comments

Anna Kushnir runs a blog on a high profile platform over at Nature Publishing. Last Saturday she complained about the user fiendliness of PubMed.

I have spent an absurd amount of time on PubMed recently and can say in no uncertain terms that it is making my dissertation writing way more painful than it needs to be. I can hold a paper in my hands, search for two authors’ last names and have PubMed come up with nothing.

PubMed, however is probably the most widely used bibliographic database in the world. Certainly in the world of Medicine. Many libraries run special classes to teach the intricacies of PubMed. We -librarians- have to admit, searching PubMed is not easy.  It is certainly not intuitive. After you’ve found what you searched for, then it is complicated to get the information over to another programme such as Reference Manager or EdnNote. If you succeed in that, you get abbreviated journal title’s, authors with maximally two initials etc….

How surprising was the reaction of Dean Giustini. Well his reaction is perhaps typical for a librarian in general, we go out and teach the user a few tricks. We teach and teach. The database is not broken! It’s the user we need to mend.

I thought Dean would know better than this. Of course he is right in the fact that this complaint on PubMed is an excellent teaching moment. But I would rather stress the message from Anna Kushnir, and that is that searching PubMed is not intuitive. Far from it. Even if you would have had classes some years ago in searching PubMed, that knowledge is now obsolete. That is good for PubMed, they innovate and improve, but when we think that refresher courses in searching PubMed should be high of the lists of Doctors, surgeon and medical researchers, we are speculating on the wrong track. They simply don’t have time for these courses. It is a rat race to keep informed on the progress of their own specialities. Why would they need courses for full time MLIS professionals to search a bibliographic database?

We have to go out there and listen to our users. Anna Kushnir is one of them. Her message is plain and simple, searching PubMed -however good we think it already might be- should become more intuitive. I think we should do a lot better and can do a lot better to build these more intuitive search engines.

I see the post from Anna more as a challenge for our profession, than as a teaching moment.

Comments op wowter.nl tijdelijk gesloten

Published on March 22, 2008 in Blogging. 1 Comment

With apologies to my English readers.

De posting gaat over mijn Nederlandstalig blog. Wegens een ongekend grote en hevige spam attack op mijn andere domein is het commentaar daar tijdelijk gesloten, en kan ik daar op dit moment ook niet posten. Daarom dit kanaal maar even gebruiken om mijn trouwe lezers op de hoogte te stellen. Via de koppen in de linkerkollom wordt dit wel op die site getoond.

Wat is RSS toch handig…..

New issue of Evidence Based Library and Information Practice available

Published on March 22, 2008 in EBL. 0 Comments

The latest issue of EBLIP has been published. The new issue contains two full articles (Developing a Comprehensive Search Strategy for Evidence Based Systematic Reviews and Improving Customer Satisfaction: Changes as a Result of Customer Value Discovery), but many evidence based summaries. The latter I find particularly interesting. These summaries give a thorough review of research published elsewhere. A really quick way of catching up with the literature. The title in this issue I couldn’t resist was Too Few Articles in the Journal Literature on Instruction in Academic Libraries are Research-Based.

BTW for those interested, the journal is looking for new editorial advisors. They have an impressive list already, but they are still looking for more hands. What I had not realized is that the journal is double blind peer reviewed. I wonder how many journals in our profession can actually boast that.

ISI Web of Knowledge development survey

Published on March 20, 2008 in Databases. 1 Comment

Thomson Scientific has posted a small survey on the new Web of Knowledge interface. It only took 5 to 10 minutes to complete. Really worth the effort when you are serious about this product. One of the questions struck me as a bit odd was where they inquired about the necessity of a fully functioning back button on your browser. It struck me as odd since I have heard from marketing people themselves that users are complaining about a not functioning back button. I only get frustrated a couple of times per session in Web of Knowledge when a page has expired once again. Old habits never die. So each time a whistle a foul tone when it happens.

So please take this Survey, and tell them!

The response box for ideas for improvement is a bit small. So please ISI have a look at the following related posts:

Seems that times are changing, and they start listening to their users again!

Avoiding Google spam warnings

Published on March 19, 2008 in Library2.0. 0 Comments

Did I report yesterday about the -nearly obnoxious- Google spam warnings from the implementation of the Google Book Search API. Today a work around was implemented. The GBS API is proxied from our library catalog.

It appears to be working well from the campus as well now.

Peter has more on it. We will keep monitoring this service though. Anybody having advice?

Implementing the Google Book Search API at Library Wageningen UR

Published on March 18, 2008 in Library2.0. 2 Comments

Last Thursday Google announced the Book Search API officially. That created some excitement in the Dutch Library world as well. The public library at Delft -those DOK boys from the Shanachie Tour- has implemented it in their catalog using the static linking options to Google Books.

Our application developers were also very interested in this new toy and made a first step of implementation for the books in our catalog based on the ISBN numbers available. Where we had Amazon book covers already available, kept these (eg. The genetic diversity of cacao and its utilization), on many occasions we already linked to the fulltext of books but could now include the Google Book cover to the catalog as well (eg: Return to resistance : breeding crops to reduce pesticide dependence). However the most interesting cases are of course those books available at the library, but which have now fulltext links through Google Books as well (eg: Illustrated guide to integrated pest management in rice in tropical Asia).

We have not reached the full potential of fulltext linking to Google Books yet. Our current implementation is based on ISBN only. So all books before 1965 have not yet been linked to Google Books. Our problem is quite simple, in the Netherlands we are not using OCLC numbers in the Central Dutch Catalog, albeit PICA is currently 100% part of OCLC. We are using Pica Production Numbers instead. So we have inquired in Leiden (OCLC the Netherlands), and they are inquiring in Dublin (OH) to get at PPN to OCLC conversion table or whatever. After we have resolved this little problem we van continue to link the older books as well.

Another problem we encountered is that the GB API results into spam warnings quite quickly and requires you to fill out a captcha. With the GB API implemented at in our catalog we run at the university quite quickly into problems. All traffic from the university has the same IP address, that of the firewall, which Google identifies quite quickly as illegal activity. I suspect other universities will experience similar problems. At home however, it works swell.

Thomson launches ScienceWatch

Published on March 11, 2008 in Databases. 0 Comments

One of the lesser known citation database from Thomson Scientific is the Essential Science Indicators. It is one of the databases that has actually some of the most interesting material since it contains analyses of the WoS data over the past ten years. Since it is a bit of an odd database, there is quite a lot of support material around it. Those websites however had a look and feel of the twentieth century (have a look, before it is too late, at In-cites or ESI-topics and you will probably agree).

However, they have updated the site, and a completely overhauled the looks, resulting in a brand new ScienceWatch. It looks much better, cleaner, fresher, and appears to be better organized. However, for the most important page for my day to day work, the journal list, they still use the old journal list at In-Cites.

If they are about to redesign the list, I only have a few simple requests for Thomson. Please do include ISSN numbers in this list, and secondly match the journal abbreviations with those in Web of Science. The last one seems only too logical, bu it wasn’t the practice up till now. At the same time I do realize that this request means a major overhaul of the ESI database as well. Perhaps that is about time. After the new Web of Knowledge this interesting database can’t be left behind. But please, please, please, do keep the file as a single dowloadable table, that works real fine. Much better than the current master journal lists.

With this new site I have to update my RSS feeds as well! A bit odd.

Elsevier’s topcited just launched

Published on March 6, 2008 in Scientometrics. 0 Comments

Where Thomson scientific has already for quite some years the free website ISIhighlycited, Elsevier has launched today (?) a competitive product called TopCited. Albeit not the same, it is clear that the competition is inspiring both companies to come up with new products in each other niches. The databases are effectively a lure to get reserchers interested in the products behind it. TopCited gives an overview of subject-specific top 20 cited articles in the past 3, 4 or 5 years of publication. The underlying database for the citation data is Scopus of course.
I just discovered it, some quick impressions:

  • A time frame of maximally 5 years is a bit brief. I would love to see a 10 year frame as well.
  • I suspect they have some difficulty of determining the research field of article published in multidisciplinary journals such as Nature and Science. They seem to be lacking from rankings, albeit a glimpsed a few. Too few according to my impression.

Later on I will look at this new site more carefully, and will attempt to make a comparison with the competitive Thomson databases.

What’s in a name

Published on March 6, 2008 in Scientometrics. 0 Comments

In courses on citation analysis for research evaluation I always give stern warning to researchers not to change their names. That is most important nowadays since it has become fashion to publish on a first name basis. First names differ occasionally from given names and can lead therefore to confusion when evaluators perform a citation analysis for whatever purpose. The situation is always a trifle more  complicated  for female researchers.  Young aspiring scientist start publishing  with their own name. Later on in their career some of them opt to publish under their husband’s name. Not to mention what happens after a divorce.

Since citation analysis is seemingly easy to perform with more and more databases offering simple citation lookup options, researchers should be aware of the consequences of their, often sloppy or at least in consequent, habits of referring to their own names in scholarly articles.

In today’s newspaper (NRC 20080305) there was a very interesting article reporting on some research carried out at the University of Tilburg. In this research they experimented with the influence of the change of the woman’s name after marriage on their social career. Three different experiments were performed and all three of them showed unequivocally that changing names after marriage had a negative effect on their social careers.

So far so good. But what amazed me most was that 83% of the female students of Tilburg University (going for their MSc)  taking part in these experiments planned to change their names after marriage.  This  is apparently  about the national average.  Of the male students 81%  expected their future wifes to be to adopt their names.

I was under the impression that years and years of women’s lib would have solved this problem quite soon. How wrong I was.

Hattip: GS

New version of Citeseer available

Published on March 3, 2008 in Databases and Scientometrics. 4 Comments

Citeseer was the first citation enhanced  bibliographic  database which provided free available citation data for the scientific literature. It was  therefore the first serious competitior for the kings of citation data ISI/Thomson Scientific. Citseer covered the literature of computer and information science. Started in 1997 at the NEC Research Institute, Princeton, New Jersey it has come a long way. Since it’s inception, the original CiteSeer grew to index over 750,000 documents and served over 1.5 million requests daily, pushing the limits of the system’s capabilities.

The next Generation Citeseer, CiteseerX, is now available for search.

My first impression is a really nice intuitive layout, and a fast search performance. I will keep pointing students to this free resource during my classes on citation analysis.