Discoverability within Context

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Discoverability within Context

• - How Secondary Publishers Add Value

Andrea Powell, Executive Director, Publishing,
CABI a.powell_at_cabi.org
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What do AI services do again?

• Identify appropriate primary literature within
  specific discipline (e.g. life science,
  engineering, medicine)
• Acquire content (on an on-going basis)
• Select relevant items within source documents
  (i.e. apply a quality and relevance filter)
• Process original content to generate a
  bibliographic record, with controlled indexing,
  standardised terminology, additional terms to aid
  retrievability and (increasingly) links to
  full-text
• Create searchable database for delivery via a
  multitude of platforms and formats
• And all kinds of other things (of which more
  later)

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CAB Abstracts an example

• Subject scope agriculture, environment
  associated applied life sciences
• Coverage 1910 2007 (7.75 million references)
• Journals covered c. 8000 per annum (in print or
  online)
• Over 50 languages covered, from over 115
  countries
• Non-serial items covered books, reports,
  conference proceedings, bulletins, Websites
• New records added per year 225,000 (vs. 150,000
  in 2000)
• Controlled vocabulary CAB Thesaurus
• Availability online, CD-ROM, in print, via
  numerous vendors

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Oh, and we employ people to do this
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Extra indexing terms added during AI process to
aid discoverability
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Are AI services relevant today?

• Dont web search engines do the same job?
• Dont publishers make their bibliographic
  information freely searchable online anyway?
• Dont we all add metadata to our journal articles
  these days and deposit them with CrossRef?
• Isnt Google Scholar good enough?

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The Charleston Advisor says

• The vast majority of academic literature is
  found in the Hidden Web. While Google Scholar
  has made valiant attempts to include a range of
  resources in this category, it is apparent that
  coverage leans heavily on the sciences, rarely
  includes all the offerings even from partner
  publishers and misses many of the quality
  resources which are more usually accessible to
  scholars through institutional subscriptions.

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GlaxoSmithKline says

• Google Scholar is not the answer to all
  information needs
• Not comprehensive
• Not always up-to-date
• Still in beta!
• Insecure (on the open Web)
• Traditional AI databases should still be used
• Although Google Scholar has been rolled out on
  the desktop, usage of traditional databases has
  remained stable it is complementary, not
  competitive
• Jennifer Whittaker, UKSG, April 2007

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Context is King

• Specialised AI databases identify the most
  relevant content to match the needs of the user,
  present it alongside associated material and,
  increasingly, add value to the source information
  through text mining, linking and analysis.

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AI services turn search into find

• On average, respondents claimed that it would
  take 2.7 times longer to find and search the
  relevant literature if they were denied access to
  CAB Abstracts
• In addition, users believed that in using the
  alternatives, they would find, on average, only
  64 of the information they would have obtained
  using CAB Abstracts.
• The estimated annual benefit to Australia of
  using CAB Abstracts is between AUS 473k and
  788k
• - Benefits to Australia of selected CABI
  products, ACIAR, October 2006

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Increasing your content discoverability

• DO
• Provide content freely and regularly and in an
  appropriate format (e.g. by providing gratis
  access to your website or by delivering XML feed)
• Let us know of any changes to your publications
• Send us your non-serial items
• Allocate DOIs to each item and deposit them
• Provide abstracts for everything, including books

• DONT
• Ask for royalties or usage reports
• Forget to apply same rules to online journals and
  e-books (e.g. for citation) as to print ones
• Place restrictions on use of abstracts
• Publish without an English title
• Ask us to use usernames and passwords to access
  your content
• Devise your own taxonomy

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Plus ça change

• CAS celebrated its 100th birthday in January 2007
• CABIs first secondary publication was launched
  in 1910 and is still going strong today
• The INSPEC archive dates back to 1898
• but our products have evolved over time in
  response to user needs and the explosion of
  content

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Adding value and context

• Ei Engineering Village
• user-allocated tags bottom up indexing from
  users
• users urged to tag any record in Ei Village for
  public, private, institutional or group use
• CSA Illustrata
• provides web-based access to indexed tables,
  figures, maps, graphs, charts and other images
  contained in scholarly articles, providing
  researchers with precision, efficiency, and
  relevance in the data discovery process.
• CAS STN - STN Viewer
• a new web-based workflow productivity tool. STN
  Viewer helps researchers to manage and evaluate
  full-text patent documents in the STN collection
  of patent databases.

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Adding value and context

• Scopus
• Addition of the h-index to cited authors (like
  an Impact Factor for authors)
• Use of visualisation tools around the h-index for
  monitoring author performance
• CAB Abstracts Plus
• Third party full text journals conferences,
  focusing on hard to find content (120 journals
  220 conferences so far)
• CAB Reviews comprehensive and authoritative
  analysis of developments in a specific subject
  area
• Scientific data Distribution Maps, Descriptions
  of Fungi Bacteria

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Using Web 2.0 methods to draw users to content.
(yours and ours)

• CABI Blog hand picked and carefully sorted
• CABI editors regularly post items that catch
  their eye, drawing attention to hot topics and
  then referring (subtly) to related content in CAB
  Abstracts
• Blog posts are picked up by search engines and
  other bloggers through services like Technorati,
  Connotea and deli.cio.us
• Not a hard sell but an excellent
  profile-raising exercise, emphasising the
  scientific skills of CABI staff and enhancing our
  brand

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If you cant beat em

• CABI lets Google index a large portion of the CAB
  Abstracts database for Google Scholar
• Puts our content where the users (not the
  librarians) start their research
• Encourages usage of the database within
  subscribing institutions (which the librarians
  like)
• Raises profile of CABI and our products (which we
  like)
• Brings more eye-balls to the full-text (which you
  like!)

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In conclusion

• As the amount of published information increases,
  and the time people have to spend looking for it
  decreases, discovery services are as vital as
  ever.
• Work with secondary services in your discipline
  to make life easier for your customers!