Constructing experimental indicators for Open Access documents

The ongoing paradigm change in the scholarly publication system ('science is turning to e-science') makes it necessary to construct alternative evaluation criteria/metrics which appropriately take into account the unique characteristics of electronic publications and other research output in digital formats. Today, major parts of scholarly Open Access (OA) publications and the self-archiving area are not well covered in the traditional citation and indexing databases. The growing share and importance of freely accessible research output demands new approaches/metrics for measuring and for evaluating of these new types of scientific publications. In this paper we propose a simple quantitative method which establishes indicators by measuring the access/download pattern of OA documents and other web entities of a single web server. The experimental indicators (search engine, backlink and direct access indicator) are constructed based on standard local web usage data. This new type of web-based indicator is developed to model the specific demand for better study/evaluation of the accessibility, visibility and interlinking of open accessible documents. We conclude that e-science will need new stable e-indicators.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure

Improving Retrieval Results with discipline-specific Query Expansion

Choosing the right terms to describe an information need is becoming more difficult as the amount of available information increases. Search-Term-Recommendation (STR) systems can help to overcome these problems. This paper evaluates the benefits that may be gained from the use of STRs in Query Expansion (QE). We create 17 STRs, 16 based on specific disciplines and one giving general recommendations, and compare the retrieval performance of these STRs. The main findings are: (1) QE with specific STRs leads to significantly better results than QE with a general STR, (2) QE with specific STRs selected by a heuristic mechanism of topic classification leads to better results than the general STR, however (3) selecting the best matching specific STR in an automatic way is a major challenge of this process.Comment: 6 pages; to be published in Proceedings of Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries 2012 (TPDL 2012

Why is a new Journal of Informetrics needed?

In our study we analysed 3.889 records which were indexed in the Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) database in the research field of informetrics. We can show the core journals of the field via a Bradford (power law) distribution and corroborate on the basis of the restricted LISA data set that it was the appropriate time to found a new specialized journal dedicated to informetrics. According to Bradford's Law of scattering (pure quantitative calculation), Egghe's Journal of Informetrics (JOI) first issue to appear in 2007, comes most probable at the right time.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure

Cross-concordances: terminology mapping and its effectiveness for information retrieval

The German Federal Ministry for Education and Research funded a major terminology mapping initiative, which found its conclusion in 2007. The task of this terminology mapping initiative was to organize, create and manage 'cross-concordances' between controlled vocabularies (thesauri, classification systems, subject heading lists) centred around the social sciences but quickly extending to other subject areas. 64 crosswalks with more than 500,000 relations were established. In the final phase of the project, a major evaluation effort to test and measure the effectiveness of the vocabulary mappings in an information system environment was conducted. The paper reports on the cross-concordance work and evaluation results.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures, 11 tables, IFLA conference 200

Comparing webometric with web-independent rankings: a case study with German universities

In this paper we examine if hyperlink-based (webometric) indicators can be used to rank academic websites. Therefore we analyzed the interlinking structure of German university websites and compared our simple hyperlink-based ranking with official and web-independent rankings of universities. We found that link impact could not easily be seen as a prestige factor for universities.Comment: 3 pages, ACM Web Science 201

Discovering Links for Metadata Enrichment on Computer Science Papers

At the very beginning of compiling a bibliography, usually only basic information, such as title, authors and publication date of an item are known. In order to gather additional information about a specific item, one typically has to search the library catalog or use a web search engine. This look-up procedure implies a manual effort for every single item of a bibliography. In this technical report we present a proof of concept which utilizes Linked Data technology for the simple enrichment of sparse metadata sets. This is done by discovering owl:sameAs links be- tween an initial set of computer science papers and resources from external data sources like DBLP, ACM and the Semantic Web Conference Corpus. In this report, we demonstrate how the link discovery tool Silk is used to detect additional information and to enrich an initial set of records in the computer science domain. The pros and cons of silk as link discovery tool are summarized in the end.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figures, 7 listings, presented at SWIB1