Archive for October 2009
Elsevier “gives” Academics 2 new tools for internal assessment of productivity
Elsevier is entering an educational market that has, now, adopted these new management techniques and tools for internal assessment of productivity and for external comparative assessment. (…)
SciVal Spotlight (www.info.spotlight.scival.com) is intended to provide research administrators with a “strategic analysis tool that enables academic executives to make informed strategic decisions by measuring and evaluating an institution’s research performance. (…)
Elsevier sees the SciVal Spotlight as helping administrators in six key areas:
- Identify specific areas of research excellence and emerging strengths
- Identify areas of interdisciplinary research
- View their relative standing to their peers in various disciplines
- Uncover and identify new research opportunities
- Determine areas of research leadership that may be at risk of being overtaken by others
- Search for top candidates for external recruitment or retention within an organization
SciVal Funding (www.info.funding.scival.com), the company’s latest product, is a “web-based solution that gives research administrators and researchers in the pre-award stage immediate and comprehensive access to current research funding opportunities and award information.” Citing the lack of a single source that melds funding opportunities with competitive information and local research data, Elsevier calls this “the most comprehensive funding intelligence solution” on the market.
SciVal Funding is intended to help researchers locate the most appropriate and most likely grant opportunities to maximize their potential for receiving funding. The product integrates information on existing award winners, based partially on published articles and other results of past winners, as well as other historic information on awards and information from the foundations, or other sources, on their priorities and goals.
Herther, Nancy. Elsevier’s New SciVal Products Target Academic Accountability and Strategic Planning. Information Today, Online (Posted On October 8, 2009): http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/…
Impact Factor still dominates
Whatever initiatives to compete the famous Impact Factor owned by Thomson, IF still dominates small world of the Research evaluation, says an article in IWR.
“Journal impact factors (IFs) have become a status symbol in the world of research. With libraries facing severe budget cuts in the recession, IF scores can help decide which journals remain essential to a collection. (…)
More important than the IF number itself is the ranking position it gives a journal, enabling the identification of high-impact or must-have journals. In a survey, 49% of respondents believed the IF was an “important” factor when judging a journal and 26.7% said it was a “very important” factor.
Venkatraman, Archana. Impact factors dominate citation metrics. Information World Review. Online (10th of September 2009): http://www.iwr.co.uk/information-world-review/analysis/2249258/journals-cherish-status-symbol
Science SN are far from getting the critical mass
Once again, an excellent review (including important players’ interviews) by David Bradley about the low adoption of social networks by Scientists.
If uptake is “up to 88%” within the business world, “a mere 1 in 7 research scientists use such tools as part of their work“.
“We are just now in the early evolution of scientific networks” says a pro. Other think “that the pure social networking sites for researchers just don’t work“.
Some services have reached good score in terms of members enrollement. “But, despite their best efforts and a lot of hard work, I’m sure many of them recognise that they are yet to reach a critical mass of the kind achieved by an offline networking community, such as the American Chemical Society, for instance.”
Arguments are well known: no career incentives, no added-value, no killer-application, no time to waste, too many registration to do, etc.
Read the full article:
Bradley, David. Gen-F scientists ignoring social networking. Online (october 7, 2009): http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/gen-f-scientists-ignoring-social-networking.hml
ChemSpider
ChemSpider is a free access service providing a structure centric
community for chemists. Providing access to millions of chemical
structures and integration to a multitude of other online services,
ChemSpider is the richest single source of structure-based chemistry
information.
My opinion: again a new player into the Chemistry area. Its intuitive
interface and associated links to commercial providers of compounds
could be appreciated by PubChem or SciFinder users.
SI in Research Information!
My article has been published in the latest issue (N°44, oct-nov. 2009):
Librarians still have vital role in the Web 2.0 era
You can read it here
Communicating knowledge: how and why researchers publish and disseminate their findings
An important study has been published by the RIN.
The report examines the motivations, incentives and constraints that lead UK researchers in different subjects and disciplines to publish and disseminate their work in different ways. It explores how and why they cite other researchers’ work, as well as how their decisions on publication and citation are influenced by past and anticipated research assessment.
Only 12 % of UK researchers consider as “very important” or “quite important” to communicate on Blog or web forums!
The survey shows that over 60% of researchers believe that open access repositories are either ‘not important’ or ‘not applicable’ to the dissemination of their research. This may reflect researchers’ concerns about the little influence of this new way to disseminate Science
Traditional channels (Peer reviewed journals and Conference communciations) are still the preferred choice (respectively 99.9% and 86 % “very important” or “quite important”).
