28 maart 2007
ISI Web of Knowledge consortium day in the Netherlands
Thomson Scientific paid a long overdue to visit to their Dutch library customers today. In quite a posh hotel in Utrecht they had organized a whole day meeting in cooperation with the consortium of Dutch University Libraries (UKB). A whole day! Was that really needed? Well for somebody who uses WoS on a nearly daily basis, it was a little bit over the top. However for some attendees from some colleges of higher education it was quite a good grounder in to the basics of WoS.
Along the way we picked up some interesting bits and pieces as well. Such as the fact that the coverage of journals by all three ISI databases has increased from 8700 scholarly journals to 9200 journals. Despite the extensive explanation of journal selection by editorial committees it was admitted that the number of French and Spanish language journals increased under pressure from library consortia in those geographical areas. Let's assume that they included only the top journals in those languages.
The unique author identification aids which have been available since the end of last year has now finally moved beyond the authors listed in ISIhighlycited only. Apparently this is now available for some 180,000 unique authors that have collected at least more than 1000 citations each. For the science commons we have to wait a little longer.
We also heard that the term "correcting for self citations" in the fairly recent (and impressive) citation reports is in fact a little misleading. Since it only corrects for the citations from the journals in the original search results. Should have worked that out for myself before, but it reminds me of the discussions we had with Elsevier on Scopus in Utrecht last year.
It was a pity that the basic grounder on general searches took so long, that we hardly covered cited references searches. It passed the screen a few times though. Interesting to not that the marketers from ISI still talked about the citation look up results, and then always wanted to loop up the full search of citing references. I mentioned to them that many researchers are actually only interested in the citation lookup results and want to have a simple and direct export function from those results into, for instance Excel. I was under the impression that my arguments didn't make a big impression really. So we will continue for some time with our users complaining about the difficulty of downloading the cited reference search look-up results in to some other software (excel preferably).
Another nice one, well hidden in the depths of WoS, is the possibility of RSS feeds in addition to the e-mail alerts. With the latter I was familiar with. But at a certain point my vanity searches expired and I didn’t bother to extend anymore. The nice thing about the RSS alerts is that they don't expire. You need to register with ISI though, I really wonder how many users have profiles on ISI. ISI couldn't tell. I wonder if that is included in the usage reports. Something to check at a later date.
In the afternoon there was some more attention for EndNoteWeb. What really amazed me is that there was no EndNoteX account required. Which somehow was the impression that I had from all their advertisements. My neighbour was under that impression as well, so I wasn't the only one. But apparently we can make an EndNote Web account because the university has an WoS license. Interesting to hear from the audience all kind of little problems that I experienced myself as well. Toolbar configuration problems, login in to some external databases (which was later confirmed as an existing bug). Well, personally I can't get really serious about EndNote Web, but perhaps useful for beginning users. I will grill it more thoroughly in the future though.
The best was saved for the end. We got a look at some mock-ups for the major overhaul of Web of Knowledge that is planned for July this year. The colours are army green and soft yellow. The main pages focus on cross-search, and simplified boxes on the first screens. The refine search options will move from the top to the left, and some refine options are shown more clearly (more like Scopus?) but still offer more options to refine than Scopus does at this moment. The busy menu that appears on the right hand side of the screen is either much quieter or disappears. Can't remember exactly anymore. Cited reference searches are still similar to what they are at the moment. They are not going to improve their indexing, they are not going to correct citations when the mistakes are obvious. In a few years time you have to remember that author names were once only 15 characters long, then 18, than included diacriticals and spaces, and at some point in the future will include first names on some occasions as well. I really wonder if you change indexing policies, you shouldn’t try to correct as much as possible the repercussions of this change for your historical data as well.
And in the end they will still carry the brand ISI, and the databases SCI, SSCI and A&H but that is for historical reasons only.
Update Ecobibl was er ook en heeft een verslag geplaatst.
Along the way we picked up some interesting bits and pieces as well. Such as the fact that the coverage of journals by all three ISI databases has increased from 8700 scholarly journals to 9200 journals. Despite the extensive explanation of journal selection by editorial committees it was admitted that the number of French and Spanish language journals increased under pressure from library consortia in those geographical areas. Let's assume that they included only the top journals in those languages.
The unique author identification aids which have been available since the end of last year has now finally moved beyond the authors listed in ISIhighlycited only. Apparently this is now available for some 180,000 unique authors that have collected at least more than 1000 citations each. For the science commons we have to wait a little longer.
We also heard that the term "correcting for self citations" in the fairly recent (and impressive) citation reports is in fact a little misleading. Since it only corrects for the citations from the journals in the original search results. Should have worked that out for myself before, but it reminds me of the discussions we had with Elsevier on Scopus in Utrecht last year.
It was a pity that the basic grounder on general searches took so long, that we hardly covered cited references searches. It passed the screen a few times though. Interesting to not that the marketers from ISI still talked about the citation look up results, and then always wanted to loop up the full search of citing references. I mentioned to them that many researchers are actually only interested in the citation lookup results and want to have a simple and direct export function from those results into, for instance Excel. I was under the impression that my arguments didn't make a big impression really. So we will continue for some time with our users complaining about the difficulty of downloading the cited reference search look-up results in to some other software (excel preferably).
Another nice one, well hidden in the depths of WoS, is the possibility of RSS feeds in addition to the e-mail alerts. With the latter I was familiar with. But at a certain point my vanity searches expired and I didn’t bother to extend anymore. The nice thing about the RSS alerts is that they don't expire. You need to register with ISI though, I really wonder how many users have profiles on ISI. ISI couldn't tell. I wonder if that is included in the usage reports. Something to check at a later date.
In the afternoon there was some more attention for EndNoteWeb. What really amazed me is that there was no EndNoteX account required. Which somehow was the impression that I had from all their advertisements. My neighbour was under that impression as well, so I wasn't the only one. But apparently we can make an EndNote Web account because the university has an WoS license. Interesting to hear from the audience all kind of little problems that I experienced myself as well. Toolbar configuration problems, login in to some external databases (which was later confirmed as an existing bug). Well, personally I can't get really serious about EndNote Web, but perhaps useful for beginning users. I will grill it more thoroughly in the future though.
The best was saved for the end. We got a look at some mock-ups for the major overhaul of Web of Knowledge that is planned for July this year. The colours are army green and soft yellow. The main pages focus on cross-search, and simplified boxes on the first screens. The refine search options will move from the top to the left, and some refine options are shown more clearly (more like Scopus?) but still offer more options to refine than Scopus does at this moment. The busy menu that appears on the right hand side of the screen is either much quieter or disappears. Can't remember exactly anymore. Cited reference searches are still similar to what they are at the moment. They are not going to improve their indexing, they are not going to correct citations when the mistakes are obvious. In a few years time you have to remember that author names were once only 15 characters long, then 18, than included diacriticals and spaces, and at some point in the future will include first names on some occasions as well. I really wonder if you change indexing policies, you shouldn’t try to correct as much as possible the repercussions of this change for your historical data as well.
And in the end they will still carry the brand ISI, and the databases SCI, SSCI and A&H but that is for historical reasons only.
Update Ecobibl was er ook en heeft een verslag geplaatst.
Labels: EndNote, English, ISI, Web of Science, WoS
