What’s new in search? Internet Librarian Oct 29 th 2007

2 Agenda  Search & Information retrieval in the scholarly context  Exploring the different methods of knowledge discovery  The power of the specialised search engine  Experiments in expert-driven, community search

3 Options beyond Google in a general sense…

4 Scholarly information explodes  High amount of published content  Scopus has 30m abstracts  ScienceDirect has 8 million articles  # of articles published per year by Elsevier increased from 160K in 2000 to 250K+ in 2005  Amount of scholarly Web content even higher  Scirus currently indexes over 450 million science items  Size general Web has exploded  Worldwide Internet: Now Serving 61 Billion Searches per Month* * Web pages indexed in Scirus Millions E Articles on ScienceDirect Millions

5 Finding meaningful content amidst the ‘data smog’ General Search is only one option. There are several other, more focussed methods of content discovery available to researchers.  Browsing  Linking  Alerting  Specialised Searching  User collaboration/sharing

6 Browsing still effective  Journal browsing remains important for content discovery  Users use journal browsing to abreast with subject area  31% of all full text article use on ScienceDirect is a results of journal browsing  Users that start on a journal home page on average download 1.9 articles in a session  User are provided the option to list favourite journals and receive Journal Issue alerts (Table of Contents)

7 Linking  Reference linking and cited by links are very effective content discovery methods  Publishers are collaborating to ensure correct reference linking (CrossRef)  8% of all full text article use on ScienceDirect comes from reference linking. Same is expected from cited-by links  Next to reference and cited by links in official literature there is  Web references and cited bys  Patent references and cited bys  Clustering  Author linking

8 Alerts Pushing relevant content results  Journal Issue alerts (RSS)  Top articles alert  Citation alert  Search alert

9 Search yields more than just journal results!

10 Subject Specific Search platforms remain important  General Web search engines often 1st choice information tool for scientists (66%) and physicians (55%)*  However, subject specific search platforms remain important  Professionals are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with general search**  Average # full text article downloads per session started from PubMed is 3. For other platforms this is as low as 1.5 * Outsell report for RE Search group** Outsell report – iMarket – Vertical Search Engines Deliver What Big Search Engines miss

11 User collaboration/Sharing  Discovery through communities and networks  Community-driven sources selection  WIKIs  Social bookmaking/Tagging  Reviewing and commenting  Ranking & classification by users » Active and inactively (through usage & behaviour) Combining Browse, Link, Alert and Search in a Community and Network-driven system!

12 Social bookmarking/tagging  For researchers & research groups

13 Wikipedia – science content

14 Citizendium – science content

15 Scholarpedia – example article

16 Scirus Topic Pages Research 2.0 tool developed by Scirus to help librarians and researchers better utilize the wide range of information resources available in today’s networked world. Free, Wiki-like platform for the scientific community Experts create topic-centered pages with links to journal and web scientific content Great new way for researchers to discover most relevant scientific literature as recommended by expert authors Currently in beta at with a number of sample Scirus Topic Pages to view

17 Topic Pages [Beta] Homepage

18 Sample topic page

19 Key takeaway points Specialized tools are always better for scholarly information retrieval There are several proven techniques for scholarly, information retrieval Wikis with integrated expert approval systems are emerging as real contenders There are a number of innovations in the area of Research 2.0 Scirus Topic Pages 2Collab

20 Thank You! For more information on Scirus visit