Reading: Social bookmarking helps with Journal evaluation

Haustein, Stefanie and Siebenlist, Tobias.
Applying social bookmarking data to evaluate journal usage. Journal of Informetrics. Article in Press, Corrected Proof.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2011.04.002

It has been shown that bookmarks of journal articles can be analyzed to measure journal usage independently from publishers. Data can be extracted about how often journal articles are used on a global scale. Tags assigned by users can give a new perspective on journal content and visualize trends of journal perception from the readers’ point of view.
By bookmarking and tagging articles, academic prosumers generate new information about resources, i.e. usage statistics and content description of scientific journals.
Given the lack of global download statistics, the authors propose the application of social bookmarking data to journal evaluation.

For a set of 45 physics journals all 13,608 bookmarks from CiteULike, Connotea and BibSonomy to documents published between 2004 and 2008 were analyzed.
This article explores bookmarking data in STM and examines in how far it can be used to describe the perception of periodicals by the readership.

Four basic indicators are defined, which analyze different aspects of usage: Usage Ratio, Usage Diffusion, Article Usage Intensity and Journal Usage Intensity. Tags are analyzed to describe a reader-specific view on journal content.

Social bookmarking in academics is however still in its infancy. Inconsistent and incomplete entries made retrieval cumbersome and a matching to other bibliographic data necessary. Metadata quality is crucial for the services to successfully keep old and gain new customers. So it was surprising to discover, that the entries were of bad quality…

 CiteULike also had the largest retrieval functionality and most complete metadata…
Mendeley looks like a suitable and applicable source for future usage-based journal evaluations.

Confirmation: 2collab is over!

As expected since July 2010 (see http://scienceintelligence.wordpress.com/tag/2collab/), the Elsevier social bookmarking service will be discontinued as from April 15, 2011.

Elsevier advices to migrate data to Mendeley or to RefWorks.

http://www.2collab.com/warning/

STM Social bookmarking and Journal evaluation

To complete previous posts (see 13th and 15th of December), look at this nice presentation that Stefanie Haustein and Sabrina Reher have presented at Science and Technology Indicators Conference in Leiden last September.

They applied social bookmarking data to evaluate the usage of scientific journals.

Mendeley: soon more popular than WoS and Scopus?

If the Mendeley’s founder claimed in the Guardian last summer that it will overtake the size of Web of Science (40 millions of records)  by the end of 2010, but it seems that there are a lot of duplicates into, said an estimation in last September…

How many unique papers are there in Mendeley?
http://duncan.hull.name/2010/09/01/mendeley/#more-3374

Alternatives if Yahoo closes Delicious!

Bad rumors these days!

According official blog of Yahoo! (apparently closed in the meantime), Delicious would be closed or integated into a new Yahoo concept… But the real story is not so clear…

Read further:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/is-yahoo-shutting-down-del-icio-us/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/now_yahoo_says_delicious_will_live_onsomewhere_els.php
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/17/yahoo-trying-to-sell-del-icio-us-not-to-shut-it-down/

6 major alternatives:
http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2010/12/delicious_will.html

28 alternatives:
http://sciencebase.posterous.com/28-delicious-alternatives-to-delicious

Social bookmarking for Scientists: CiteUlike…

.. is more adapted than its competitors if you work on Medicine and biology fields.

Sabrina Reher (see below previous post on Dec. 13) has gently sent me her recent dissertation.

It is in German but the figure below is enough demonstrative I think

Social Bookmarking tools for scientists: a test

Social bookmarking tools enable people to bookmark interesting resources on the web, tag them, and share the information with other users.

Scientists want to store, search, and share professional, scholarly literature.  Today there are four established social bookmarking tools serving academic purposes:

1. CiteULike (www.citeulike.org),
2. Connotea (www.connotea.org),
3. BibSonomy (www.bibsonomy.org),
4. and 2collab (www.2collab.com).

 In social bookmarking, users play the key role. The whole idea is to profit from content created by a large number of users.

The competition among BibSonomy, CiteULike, and Connotea raises the question of whether one service will be able to gain an edge over its competitors.

Results of the test:

The road testing was to create 10 references from various publishers to see how often bookmark was successfullty created without subsequent manual correction

• CITEULIKE:
  • 480,000 visits per month
  • +++: Citegeist (most popular articles)
  • Road testing: 8/10
• CONNOTEA:
  • 690,000 visits:per month
  • +++: My Library toolbox
  • +++: target the medical community
  • Road testing: 3/10
• BIBSONOMY:
  • 620,000 visits per month
  • Road testing: 4/10
• 2COLLAB:
  • 44,000 visits per month
  • Road testing: 1/10

Because of its poor abilities (except with ScienceDirect references) 2collab is renamed “2collapse” by authors of the article!

Sabrina Reher; Stefanie Haustein. Social Bookmarking in STM: PUTTING SERVICES TO THE ACID TEST. ONLINE, Vol.34, N°6, Nov-Dec 2010, pp. 34-42

Is 2Collab still alive?

Since it has experienced spam attacks in October 2009, the Elsevier
collaboration tools seems to be sleeping.

A French customer reports that Elsevier advised him to look for another
tool: “Given the current spam problems, it is probably best for you to look
for a solution other than 2collab, at the present time. ” !
(cf: http://delicious.com/bibliothecaire/2collab )

2collab icon has also disappeared from ScienceDirect interface…
Is it the first official failure of Elsevier in Web 2.0 applications engagement?

Nature believes (now) in free access and social media

According a recent press release, “All content hosted on the Nature News site (www.nature.com/news) is now freely available. This includes online news articles, and news and news features articles published in Nature“.

“Nature Publishing Group (NPG) has made this change so that Nature’s news content can be disseminated and discussed as widely as possible, as we develop nature.com as the hub for quality science news and comment. With the rise of social media such as Twitter, Facebook and our own Connotea and Nature Network, we’d like to ensure that discussions about our news and comment can include an accessible link to the article“.

http://www.nature.com/press_releases/naturenews.html

Social Bookmarking

David Crotty already said that there are too many redundant services on Science 2.0… Indeed, look at this page where an article can be collected in different online services:

from left to right: CiteULike, Complore, Connotea, Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, Technorati, Twitter