Cyberlibris Newsletter

Scientific Commons: Hunting for Academic Treasures

I have just discovered a genuine "digital" treasure island.. This is the site entitled Scientific Commons . The site is still in beta but does already contain true pearls.

Scientific Commons is reminiscent of the famous "tragedy of commons".  This tragedy refers to pastures that were left available for free to farmers. They could leave their cattle there. Guess what happened. Since nobody had a property right on the pastures, nobody cared to maintain them properly. The cattle exhausted them. It died and farmers ended up starving.

According to the founders of Scientific Commons (University of St Gallen and Institute for Media and Communications Management), academic research is radically different: It starves if there is no easy way to access it and share it:

"The major aim of the project is to develop the world’s largest communication medium for scientific knowledge products which is freely accessible to the public. A key challenge of the project is to support the rapidly growing number of movements and archives who admit the free distribution and access to scientific knowledge. These are the valuable sources for the ScientificCommons.org project. The ScientificCommons.org project makes it possible to access the largely distributed sources with their vast amount of scientific publications via just one common interface. ScientificCommons.org identifies authors from all archives and makes their social and professional relationships transparent and visible to anyone across disciplinary, institutional and technological boundaries. Currently ScientificCommons.org has indexed about 10 million scientific publications and successfully extracted 4 million authors out of this data."

I urge you to go hunting. I did find  Robert C. Merton 's PhD dissertation at MIT. I am sure PhD students will give Scientific Commons a high five!

High Five to SmealSearch!

There has been a lot of hype around Google Scholar. This is indeed a useful tool for students and researchers. To put it in a nutshell, here is what Google has to say about it:

" Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."

To give my personal example, I was able to track papers of mine for which, sadly enough, I did not have copies left over.

Now here is some great news: SmealSearch, a service from the Smeal College of Business at Pennsylvania State University. From what I have seen playing with it, it is  even better than Google Scholar. Here is what people involved in the SmealSearch Project have to say about it:

" SMEALSearch is a niche search engine that searches the web and catalogs academic articles as well as commercially produced articles and reports that address any branch of Business. The search engine crawls websites of universities, commercial organizations, research institutes and government departments to retrieve academic articles, working papers, white papers, consulting reports, magazine articles, and published statistics and facts. For certain documents, the database only stores the hyperlinks to those documents. SMEALSearch performs a citation analysis of all the academic articles accessed and lists them in order of their citation rates in academic papers (the most cited articles are listed first). Articles available through the SMEALSearch engine can be downloaded (for fair use) without any charges. However, some articles may have only the abstracts listed, and may have to be purchased directly from the appropriate sources."

Congratulations! This is a great tool. You can locate the papers, identify related articles, citations. You can rate the papers, post comments etc... You can submit papers. You can even search for business schools.

Lucky PhD students! It was a lot more difficult in my days (yes, there were less papers too!).

PS: I am sure Jim Mahar gonna be very proud of his alma mater!

L' Observatoire Cyberlibris: la recherche en management sur mesure

La recherche en management évolue vite. Le nombre de revues, de journaux académiques ne cesse de croître. A défaut d'être très spécialisé, il est difficile de soutenir un tel rythme et de suivre les nouvelles productions des chercheurs de par le monde.

L'Observatoire, qui sera mis en ligne le 1er octobre 2004, permettra aux utilisateurs de Cyberlibris de suivre en temps réel l'évolution de la recherche en management. Deux outils seront à leur disposition.

Avec le premier outil (Recherches publiées), ils pourront bâtir leur propre portefeuille de revues académiques (plus de 250 à ce jour) dont ils pourront ensuite consulter sommaires et résumés d'articles.

Avec le second outil (Recherches non publiées ), ils pourront sélectionner leurs chercheurs favoris (plus de 400 à ce jour) et accéder directement au texte intégral de leurs derniers cahiers de recherche.

En se rendant à l'Observatoire, les utilisateurs de cyberlibris restent vigilants sur l'évolution de leurs disciplines favorites.