David and I both attended presentations on ISI Web of Science today. WoS is taking an interesting and, in many ways, different approach as a search tool. Here are a few of the things that stood out:
- Keywords are de-emphasized. There is no taxonomy associated with WoS (since it is so interdisciplinary in scope), so users are encouraged to search by authors (including their home institutions) and particular publications. WoS does assign keywords to articles using an algorithm that looks at titles and summaries, so users can search by topic, but it’s certainly not the preferred method.
- Influence is understood in terms of citations. Each record is tagged with as many citation links as possible (only journal articles are included). As searchers, we were shown how to find the handful of mega-articles that hundreds of other articles on a topic all cite in common. If this really is a good measure of influence, it seems possible that one could jump into any topic knowing virtually nothing about its major players and sift them out from pure citation counts.
- H-scores. Certain Doubts has had several posts about h-scores in the past few months, so I’ll simply refer you to discussions on 29 Nov, 13 Dec, 15 Dec, 17 Dec, 19 Dec, and 28 Dec.
- Search queries seem pretty user-intensive. There’s no fuzzy search capabilities (”Did you mean X?”), so there was a lot of emphasis on wild card and truncated search strings. (See below.)
- Some attempt at visualizations. I noticed two kinds of citation reports available for viewing. One shows the number of publications returned for any search; the other shows the number of citations within that publications set. These charts are static images generated upon request, and seem similar to Scopus’ visual capabilities (although I wouldn’t know because the server always times out before my image is generated by Scopus). Here are the two charts I generated for “rawls AND justice”.
WoS has data for arts and humanities going back to 1975, and I think it will be interesting to see how much it catches on in the humanities and in philosophy. One general limitation—one that I raise in the An Introduction to Phylo—is the way in which this tool makes the user do the work, rather than the other way around. I was struck by how much presenter of the session was essentially training us to work with the tool by favoring publication data over keywords and filtering searches in certain ways, rather than giving us an intuitive tool that worked however we found most natural. In general, I think this underscores the need for more participatory design in building search tools.
Beyond just asking users what they think of the tools we’ve built, we need to learn more beforehand about how they process information and in what forms they find that information most cognitively salient. I think we’ll learn some of this once we launch and revise our displays, and I hope we can come up with some model of participatory design that facilitates the process.
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