Berlin Science Week will take place between 1-10 November and ScienceOpen is preparing something special for the occasion!
Make sure to kick off the Week right by coming to our workshop on Friday, Nov. 1, 17:00-20:00 (save the date!). This year we are focusing on going beyond Google in your online search for verified scientific resources.
Continue reading “Search for science with us at Berlin Science Week!”
ScienceOpen provides researchers with a wide range of tools to support their research – all for free. Here is a short checklist to make sure you are getting the most of the technological infrastructure and content that we have to offer. What can a researcher do on ScienceOpen?
“Search is the new journal!”, was one of the rallying cries at the recent Force11 meeting in Berlin. But what does this mean? Well, we have a bit of a problem in research – there is so much content being published these days, about 2-3 million papers each year from around 50,000 journals! It has never been more crucial to have efficient ways of searching to discover relevant work for your research question. No single human is capable of this alone.
Now, we know Google Scholar is usually everyone’s search engine of choice for research articles. But when you pop in a search term, how do you know what research is good, what’s relevant to you, what people are talking about? You just get an enormous list that trails off with ever-decreasing relevance, and are supposed to be able to figure that all out yourself. We can do better.
Efficient search is the core issue that our freely accessible multi-layer discovery engine is helping to solve. The current database at ScienceOpen has more than 36 million article records, and growing at around 100,000 new records each week. Each of these records is linked within the database to other articles through our open citation network.
We use this citation information, and other article metadata, to provide an enriched search ecosystem for users. The purpose of this is to allow users to drill down to relevant research using a range of different contexts and criteria, saving time and energy, and facilitating research discovery at multiple dimensions.
Citations are still one of the main forms of ‘academic’ currency in a modern research world. Citations only measure how many times a piece of work has been cited without additional context. As such, they are a simple proxy for ‘scholarly discussion’ of a piece of work, but beyond this are essentially devoid of legitimacy as a metric.
Sorting a search result by citations allows you to see what is most popular in a research context, and which articles have been particularly important in developing new disciplines, ideas, and ways of thinking. Identifying highly-cited articles provides for you a great starting point for further discovery. Citations reveal to you the lineage of ideas – start at the top, and work your way down! Understanding the historical context of ideas is critical for good research, and ScienceOpen helps you to explore this.
Altmetric scores are a combined measure of social attention for articles. They give us a nice idea of how much an article is being discussed in news outlets or on social media. If you want to keep up with the buzz in your field, or find out what’s of interest in another, ScienceOpen gives you the tools for that.
Continue reading “Orienting yourself using ScienceOpen search”
Publishers are continuously innovating with new formats for topical selections of literature. Today we are happy to announce our partnership with Karger, a leading biomedical publisher of international speciality journals and books covering basic and clinical research. Two of their thematic articles packages, one on Stroke and another one on Diabetes are now indexed on our platform.
Karger Topical Article Packages, our recent additions to the field of medicine, aim to support researchers in keeping up with the vast and rapidly growing research literature, and provide the quality assurance of rigorous peer review and editorial selection. Last year alone PubMed tracked 38,000 articles on diabetes and over 18,000 on stroke. With these numbers, editorial selection is a great help for researchers.
A unique feature of these collections is that their scope is not restricted to just one journal. Instead, they provide topical selections from across the entire range of the Karger publishing program. Articles are selected on the basis of a keyword-related semantic search on the abstract level. Such a relevance-based organizing principle results in a quick and convenient overview of the latest methodological and technological developments from one of the leading biomedical publishers.
From here, you can apply all the usual enhanced search and discovery filtering options, including sorting content by date, citations, Altmetric score, and readership, as well as discovering related content from across our network of 28 million research articles. For researchers, this is a great way of staying in touch with the latest and most relevant research published in your field.
Below you can find a teaser from their main topics and selected articles.
1. Stroke: Karger Topic Article Package
Being one of the leading cause of death and various physical, psychological and social disabilities, research on Stroke is an essential subfield of Biomedical Science. The new collection covers the most recent advances in the field. Some of the most important topics covered include:
2. Diabetes: Karger Topical Article Package
The collection brings together peer reviewed research articles from more than 20 journals and covers the latest developments, solutions and best practices in the curation and prevention of Diabetes and its many complications. Some of the main topics covered are:
The thematic and article-level perspective of these collections is a new direction in content curation beyond the journal that we are happy to experiment with together with Karger. They also fit well into our current research network: 42.151 articles on Stroke and 122.570 articles on Diabetes opens up the wider research context for these two collections and helps aid discovery while expanding our knowledge horizons.
Our search pages also work at the collection and journal levels help you quickly and easily find exactly what research you are looking for.
If you have any feedback on our search and discovery functions, please contact us here. And if you are a publisher looking to integrate your content and enhance its context and visibility, please contact us here.
Kick off the new year with the new unified search on ScienceOpen! We have accomplished a lot over the last year and are looking forward to supporting the academic community in 2017.
In 2016 ScienceOpen brought you more context: Now your search comes with a new analytics bar that breaks down your search results by collections, journals, publishers, disciplines, and keywords for quicker filtering. Try a search for the pressing topics of 2016 like Zika or CRISPR and take the new features for a spin.
Researcher output, journal content, reference lists, citing articles can all be dynamically sorted and explored via Altmetric score, citations, date, activity. Statistics for journals, publishers and authors give overview of the content that we are indexing on ScienceOpen. Check out the most relevant journals on ScienceOpen, for example BMC Infectious Diseases or PloS Genetics for a new perspective. Or add your publications to your ORCID and get a dynamic view of your own output.
In 2016 ScienceOpen brought you more content: We welcomed publisher customers across the entire spectrum of disciplines to ScienceOpen and expect many more for the upcoming year. We added multiple journals from Brill, River Publishers, Open Library of Humanities, Higher Education Press and featured collections for PeerJ Computer Science, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press Molecular Case Studies and the Italian Society for Victimology. We had the pleasure to work with a very diverse group, from STM to HSS, from open access to subscription-based journals, creating interdisciplinary bridges and new connections for their content. We further integrated all of SciELO on ScienceOpen this year for a more global perspective and have had a great time working with them. We are at over 27 million article records and adding content every day.
In 2016 ScienceOpen brought you more open: The ScienceOpen team participated in and helped organize numerous community events promoting Open Science. From Peer Review Week to OpenCon, talks at SSP in Vancouver and SpotOn in London, our team was on the road, debating hot issues in scholarly communication.
In order to bring more visibility to smaller community open access journals, very often with close to non-existent funding and run on a voluntary basis, we launched our platinum indexing competition. It was geared towards open access journals charging no APCs to their authors. Four successful rounds in, we have selected 18 journals to be indexed and awarded some of them with special featured collections on the ScienceOpen platform. This activity was particularly rewarding as we heard back from journals’ editors expressing their enthusiasm about the ScienceOpen project and enjoying bigger usage numbers on their content.
The ScienceOpen 2.017 version will continue to focus on context, content and open science. We are your starting point for academic discovery and networking. Together let’s explore new ways to support visibility for your publications, promote peer review, improve search and discovery and facilitate collection building. Here is to putting research in context! The year 2016 had some great moments – may 2017 bring many, many more!
Your ScienceOpen team
