58 research outputs found
Telescope Bibliographies: an Essential Component of Archival Data Management and Operations
Assessing the impact of astronomical facilities rests upon an evaluation of
the scientific discoveries which their data have enabled. Telescope
bibliographies, which link data products with the literature, provide a way to
use bibliometrics as an impact measure for the underlying data. In this paper
we argue that the creation and maintenance of telescope bibliographies should
be considered an integral part of an observatory's operations. We review the
existing tools, services, and workflows which support these curation
activities, giving an estimate of the effort and expertise required to maintain
an archive-based telescope bibliography.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, to appear in SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and
Instrumentation, SPIE Conference Series 844
Finding and Recommending Scholarly Articles
The rate at which scholarly literature is being produced has been increasing
at approximately 3.5 percent per year for decades. This means that during a
typical 40 year career the amount of new literature produced each year
increases by a factor of four. The methods scholars use to discover relevant
literature must change. Just like everybody else involved in information
discovery, scholars are confronted with information overload. Two decades ago,
this discovery process essentially consisted of paging through abstract books,
talking to colleagues and librarians, and browsing journals. A time-consuming
process, which could even be longer if material had to be shipped from
elsewhere. Now much of this discovery process is mediated by online scholarly
information systems. All these systems are relatively new, and all are still
changing. They all share a common goal: to provide their users with access to
the literature relevant to their specific needs. To achieve this each system
responds to actions by the user by displaying articles which the system judges
relevant to the user's current needs. Recently search systems which use
particularly sophisticated methodologies to recommend a few specific papers to
the user have been called "recommender systems". These methods are in line with
the current use of the term "recommender system" in computer science. We do not
adopt this definition, rather we view systems like these as components in a
larger whole, which is presented by the scholarly information systems
themselves. In what follows we view the recommender system as an aspect of the
entire information system; one which combines the massive memory capacities of
the machine with the cognitive abilities of the human user to achieve a
human-machine synergy.Comment: 14 pages, part of the forthcoming MIT book "Bibliometrics and Beyond:
Metrics-Based Evaluation of Scholarly Research" edited by Blaise Cronin and
Cassidy R. Sugimot
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