Authoratory: find an expert in any field

Authoratory is a unique database of contact information, professional interests, social connections and funding of thousands of leading scientists. The content of Authoratory is produced by a computer program analyzing large amounts of data from PubMed. PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 16 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to the 1950s. PubMed includes links to full text articles and other related resources.

Authoratory software data-mining techniques make it possible to discover new information about the authors – the information that is not apparent by reviewing one or two of their articles. For each selected author Authoratory gives the following:

• the author status: primary or non-primary (primary author publishes articles independently, while non-primary always publishes articles with another author or a group of authors)
• the list of most frequent coauthors (navigate the social network between the authors using their join publications)
• professional interests (as indicated by the MeSH keywords and by the statistical analysis of abstracts and publication titles)
• the author’s affiliated institution and contact information
• the change of all these parameters across time

Authoratory keyword search is unique as well. It uses keyword frequencies to rank authors against each other. The more papers the particular author publishes for a specific keyword, the higher his rank is in the keyword listings. With Authoratory keyword search it ’s possible to quickly find all authors with expertise in a specific narrow topic.

Reflections on Google Scholar and Hirsch index

Anne Will Harzing reflects on these citation developments form the perspective of the business and management field. She matches these sources with the Publish or Perish software. This website is one of the soources very relevant to stay in touch with. Two new white papers were added: Reflections on Google Scholar and Reflectionson the h-index. These papers discuss the validity, assumptions, and limitationsof the underlying sources and methods used by Publish or Perish.

[http://www.harzing.com/pop_gs.htm]
[http://www.harzing.com/pop_hindex.htm]
[http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm]

Peer review in the internet age: 5 alternatives

Gerry McKiernan Presents 5 alternative models for the classical peer review system:

1. Open Peer Review (let authors know the identity of reviewers)
2. Commentary-Based review (two-stage procedure where the first review phase is open)
3. Community Based review (all submisions accepted with minimal review in a standard tier and only a few with full peer review in the upper tier)
4. Usage-based review (a metric that uses access statistics as an indicator of significance)
5. Citation-based (Citebase & Web Citation Index)

The article ends with the following lines;

As observed by Harnad, “the Net …[not only] offers the possibility of implementing peer review more efficiently and equitably …,” but more significantly, provides a “real revolutionary dimension” with such features as “open peer commentary on published and ongoing work.” In addition, the Net provides “room … for unrefereed discussion too, [notably] in high-level discussion forums ….” Such enhancements to conventional peer review need not, however, be limited to features that some may view as simple extensions of the traditional model. In addition to ‘ideal’ conversations, metrics such as access statistics, as well as citing and linking, can also offer impartial indicators of valid and significant scholarship in all its forms, at any and all stages.

Transparancy is primer

Procedures need transparancy to work. Especially when it concerns (peer) review people need to have clear view on the elements and aspects of the process. I recently discovered the Center for Scientific review, where I found a nice list of review documents, fee available for all.