Science-specific Search - Scirus and beyond - Joris van Rossum - June 14 - IATUL 2007

Joris van Rossum
Scirus, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Science-specific Search: Bridging the gap in dissemination of and access to information

http://www.scirus.com/

Scirus is the free science search engine
he previously worked as a senior product manager at Scopus
(the pay science search engine http://www.scopus.com/ )

Content [Overview]
* How has content provision changed?
* How has information retrieval changed?
* Future trends

Internet has made journal publishing just one of many options for scientific content communication

why is there still journal publishing?
* stamp of authority
* versioning challenge - journal has version of record
* archiving - publishers ensure the article will always be available online

Increasing amount of content available online
* high amount of published content
- Scopus has 30 million abstracts
- ScienceDirect has 8 million articles
* amount of scholarly web content even higher
- Scirus currently indexes over 400 million scholarly web pages
(feel they need to add another 400 million on top of that in order to be complete at this moment)
* size of general web has exploded
- as of August 2005 Yahoo indexed over 19 billion pages
- Google says it indexes 3x more than that

Different content discovery methods
* browsing
* linking
* alerting
* searching
* user collaboration/sharing (potentially very strong, even replacing searching)

based on analysis from ScienceDirect usage logs

Browsing
* used to keep abreast of latest developmetns in subject area
* 31% of all full text article use on ScienceDirect is a result of journal browsing
* users that start this way download on average 1.9 articles

Linking
* very effective content discovery method
* publishers are collaborating through CrossRef to ensure correct reference linking
* 8% of all full text article use on ScienceDirect comes from reference linking
- Same is expect from 'cited-by' links
* next to reference and cited-by links in official literature there is
- web ref and cite-by
- patent ref and cite-by
- clustering
- author linking

citation paradigm applies beyond the official literature

Alerting
* journal issue [TOC] (RSS)
* top articles
* citation
* search

2-4% of downloads come from alerting

Search is the main driver of journal article use
* exponential growth of PubMed and ScienceDirect searches
- growth rates between 20-110% from 2001-2005
* search has overtaken browsing
[missed rest of slide]

search is important because it yields more than just journal results

* general web search (Google) often 1st choice for scientists (66%) and physicians (55%)

* subject-specific search platforms remain important
- avg. # of full text article downloads per sesson from PubMed is 3, from general search is 1.5

screenshot of Scirus, specialised science features

role of librarians in improving integration:
- search on library homepage, OpenURL (Scirus Library Partners)

*** User Collaboration and Sharing - The Future of Information Sharing ***

Combining browsing, linking, alerting and search in a community and network-driven system

... Scirus will launch a new community service in a couple weeks

Q: researchers aren't always searching for articles - in computer science we are interested in
aggregates e.g. projects and research programs
A: the new service will offer topic-based collected search and resources relevant to a particular area

Q (Jens): journal publishing enduring... authority good - versions ? - archival not true!
A:

archiving ScienceDirect - The Hague - for free - even if Elsevier disappears, info will still be available

why is Elsevier concerned about archiving
- helps provide confidence to move everyone to e-only
- gives authors confidence