Trip Report: ISI Visit 20071008

Meeting with Reynold Guida, Director Product Development at Thomson Scientific, formerly known as Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)

Participants: Ralf Schimmer, Reynold Guida, Ben Bowman, Johann Bauer, Dorothea Mayer, Volker Kruppa, Anke Bruns, Jarmo Schrader, Antje Michel, Wolfgang Kurtz, Inga Overkamp

Summary: The meeting focused on introducing the Journal Usage Report (JUR), a collection analysis tool which might complement the existing suite of resource instruments used by the license department (e.g. ScholaryStats, Serials Solutions ERM). In addition, Reynold presented the upcoming version of the Web of Knowledge user interface.

Agenda

 * Web of Knowledge 4 Update
 * Development Plans
 * Linking
 * Web Services
 * Web Citation Index Update
 * Journal Use Reports
 * New initiatives
 * Authorship Projects
 * Metrics

Journal Usage Reports (JUR)
Journal Usage Reports from Thomson ISI is a new analytical resource created to help librarians understand how journals are used in their institutions. In general, the tool is not limited to the journals indexed by JCR, but many features are only available for those. Therefore, JUR requires a JCR license as precondition. JUR is not an Electronic Resource Management (ERM) system, but summarizes indicators about
 * journal influence (in its subject area -> impact factor)
 * institutional publication activity (only for journals indexed in the ISI citation databases -> scope to be extended?)
 * usage statistics (COUNTER compliant usage statistics)
 * pricing information

Discussion:
 * The analysis of the publication activity is based on profiles defined by the administrative user. For institutions, departments, or other organizational units, appropriate profiles must be created by manual selection of (known) name variants. It would be much more convenient if JUR would allow the use of normal WoK Search Syntax, since many customers (in particular consortia) have already developed their specific queries. Example: MPG specific search queries provided by the IVSen
 * Selection/refinement option "by subject": Currently, this is based on journal level information as available in the ISI citation databases. It's planned to add article level subject categories.

More information: http://scientific.thomson.com/products/jur

Web of Knowledge 4 Update
Note: The old WoS interface will be available until January 2008.

Selected features:
 * EndNote/EndNote Web: Manuscript Control to integrate the individual literature management with web-based article peer review system used by big publishers like Blackwell
 * AutoAlerts via RSS or directly delivered to handhelds/PDAs (for the "digital natives")

Quick tour (marketing, flash8): http://isiwebofknowledge.com/wok/media/swf/wokdemoshell.html

Linking and Web Service
Reynold shared the following information:
 * session management: Each request via the SOAP interface creates a new session, but the application is automatically logged out after the request
 * usage statistics: Requests via the SOAP interface are counted separately

Following issues have been reported by the MPDL and need to be followed up after the meeting:
 * linking problems with CrossSearch (poor metadata in OpenURL) -> needs to be resolved with introduction of new the WoK interface
 * citation lookup interface, to pre-fetch the ISI identifier for given metadata

Web Citation Index
Together with 6 other institutions worldwide, the MPG (originally represented by IVSen, ZIM and GV-VIIb) has collaborated since 2004 as development partners for the WCI. Within the project lifetime, a range of problems emerged with parsing the reference information from the papers harvested. Although the current beta version is already being sold ("high usage" was reported), the official release is scheduled for 2008. The IVSen will review the current version and evaluate the possibility of making it immediately accessible to all MPG users (no license fees charged for development partners)
 * Redesigning backend system for harvesting references form repository documents (utilizes TS document processing capabilities)
 * Repositories will be added after extended beta (index includes approximately 67 repositories)
 * WCI records will be retrieved by the ISI CrossSearch

More information: http://scientific.thomson.com/press/2005/8298416/

New initiatives
Correction capabilities: The THD allows metadata corrections for individual records as well as global corrections applied to all resources (ISI citation databases, Current Contents, Biosis Previews, ISI Proceedings, etc.)

Administrative portal: It is planned to release some additional tools which allow site administrators to configure the WoK for their institutions, e.g. branding, link setup, local contacts.

Unfortunately, there was no time left to learn about the new ISI initiatives which focus on developing new metrics for citation analysis and author identification (authorship project). All participants agreed that further cooperation on these activities would be helpful and interesting for all parties.

Reynold Guida (and other Thomson Scientific representatives) will be having further meetings with the IVSen during the next few weeks to discuss details of metrics-related products and developments. Interested members of the MPDL or other MPG units are welcome to join (please contact Ben).