Thomas Reuters new research analytics website - http://researchanalytics.thomsonreuters.com/ – has finally provided a thread through the labyrinthine Research Analytics infrastructure that I’m able to follow – forgive the hyperbolic metaphor – it’s probably isn’t that difficult to navigate and I’m hardly an ancient Greek hero – just easily lost! Nevertheless, it links intuitively amongst the various information and I’m reviewing, in particular, the information on Web Services, Article Match Retrieval and ResearcherID in advance of next week’s meeting.
I’ve certainly asked most of the Web Services FAQ myself over the past few weeks. The most relevant from our perspective are:
- Address (including Street, City, Province, Zip Code, or Country)
- Author
- Conference (including title, location, data, and sponsor)
- Group Author
- Organization or Sub-organization
- Source Publication (journal, book or conference)
- Title
- Topic
- Year Published
What data fields can be queried through the service?
The requesting system can query the Web of Science using the following fields:
The service will support the AND, OR, NOT, and SAME Boolean operators.
What data elements are returned by the service?
The Web of Science Web Service returns five fields to the requesting system:
- Article Title
- Authors — All authors, book authors, and corporate authors
- Source — Includes the source title, subtitle, book series and subtitle, volume, issue, special issue, pages, article number, supplement number, and publication date
- Keywords — all author supplied keywords
- UT — A unique article identified provided by Thomson Reuters
One of the issues we are likely to run into retrieving data from WoS is differentiating between similar names and disambiguating the same name that has been entered in different formats and this is where ResearcherID can come in.
N.B. This is actually an issue with implications beyond Bibliosight and purely internally; I’ve been aware of the need for a unique identifier for researchers in intraLibrary for a while, prompted by a blog post from Open Research Online describing how they have developed a feed of a faculty group members’ publications from ORO (EPrints) to the faculty’s website which “made use of the fact that everyone’s publications in ORO are linked to their unique university ID.” This prompted me to wonder aloud on Twitter if such use of unique identifiers was standard practice for Eprints – @smithcolin and @ostevens tell me that it isn’t.
ResearcherID is a global service to assign a unique identifier and eliminate author misidentification – with the obvious benefit over an institutional ID that it is universal rather than just local.
As far as I understand, the ResearcherID Web Service from Thomas Reuters comprises two element -
- ResearcherID upload “that enables administrators to mass create ResearcherID profiles and upload publication data for some or all of the accounts you create for faculty, researchers, etc. at your institution.”
- Researcher ID download is “a web-based service that enables you to query ResearcherID for researchers at your institution and return publication data for them, including times cited counts where applicable, as well as return institution affiliation for researchers at the requesting institution.”
Upload is freely available to everyone but download is a subscription based service.
I have now registered with the ResearcherID batch upload service and will report on it more fully at the meeting next week.
So what about Article Match Retrieval? To be honest, this is where my thread runs out, and I’m still not entirely sure how this fits in. It’s free I think (to WoS subscribers) and the blurb says:
“Article Match Retrieval allows for a real-time lookup of bibliographic metadata such as DOI, author, source title, etc., against the Web of Science database (using the institution’s subscription entitlements). If a match is found, the service will return Times Cited information as well as links to view the full record, related records page, or citing articles page in Web of Science. An institution can use these links as a way to link into Web of Science from their library web page or institutional repository. Subscribers to Journal Citation Reports can use this service to retrieve links to the JCR record for a given journal.”
There is then a form to fill out “to find out how to create direct links to Web of Science articles or Journal Citation Reports” – I’m pretty sure I’ve already filled it out back when we were submitting the bid but this is something to check out with Jon when he comes on Wednesday…
So though things are not crystal clear quite yet, Tuesday and Wednesday next week should put us firmly on the right track.
