Stellenbosch University Library and Information Service - News from research support services

Category: Bibliometrics

New platform for discovering and evaluating scientific articles – scite

A new platform for discovering and evaluating scientific articles via Smart Citations, scite, has seen the light.

Their deep learning model classifies each citation context automatically. The numbers show how sure it is of a classification and categorise it in three different contexts, Supporting, Mentioning, Contradicting.

Josh Nicholson writes about how to use scite (see an extract below):

… in order to truly identify what research is reliable or not, we need to access every scientific article ever written. Fortunately, leading academic publishers like Wiley, The British Medical Journal, Karger, Rockefeller University Press, and others have started to share these with scite. Some have even started to display scite information directly on their articles.

We’re excited about the possibilities of bibliometrics to help scientists and non-scientists understand science better and would like to invite researchers to use our data (for free) to perform their own studies.

Download the Chrome extension and see this information popping up automatically while browsing scientific articles.

It is interesting to see that Eugene Garfield predicted this kind of service in 1964, in an article titled Can citation indexing be automated?

Slide from demonstration about scite on 30 June 2020, by Josh Nicholson

Digital Science updates Dimensions

14 January 2018 saw the launch of Digital Science’s updated product – Dimensions. The collaboration of six Digital Science products (Altmetric, Consultancy, FigShare, ReadCube, Symplectic and UberResearch) brings together siloed data for the first time to enhance Dimensions into a rich search experience, providing funding data, publications, almetrics, citations, clinical trials and patents. The Database now offers citation data, analytics and streamlined article discovery and access. The best part, it’s free! Here’s what’s available:

Free access to Dimensions:
Dimensions is freely available to anyone for personal use.

Institutional Subscription:
An institutional subscription of Dimensions (Dimensions Plus) is available at a competitive price. As described by Digital Science CEO, Daniel Hook, their institutional subscription is priced responsibly in that it is consistent with their service and continued innovation. The institutional subscription will offer enhanced features such as article access.

Dimensions badges:
Digital Science is making Dimensions badges freely available for use on digital repositories. The badges allow the extraction of detailed citation information and pre-calculated standard metrics from within any digital repository.

Read what Daniel Hook and Christian Hertzog have to say about Dimensions on the Digital Science Blog.

Try Dimensions for free.

Web of Science new features

Since the 2016 news that Web of Science had been sold, along with other products, to Clarivate Analytics, we’ve been seeing gradual changes in the Database’s design. In December 2017, Clarivate Analytics announced several changes and additions to the Web of Science design and functionality. Here’s what’s new:

Enhanced Open Access Filters:
In partnership with Impactstory, Clarivate Analytics has added enhanced open access filtering to the Web of Science database. You can now also find verified, legal versions of hybrid and green open access titles. Using oaDOI technology, WoS displays and links to Gold, green and hybrid open access titles. See Clarivate analytics’ Open Access page for more information.

Simpler Navigation:
A redesign in search results and sorting options make Web of Science a lot easier to navigate. More sorting options have been added, with a drop down list of all sorting options. A record display redesign now offers a clear, easily readable view of document information, with bibliometric information displayed prominently.

Early Access Publications:
WoS now accepts early access articles from Publishers. These are articles that have a static DOI and publication date, but no page or issue numbers yet. They are searchable using the early access document type and are updated once the publication details are available.

Daily alerts:
The WoS Core Collection is now updated daily (Mon – Fri) and now allows you to receive daily alerts as well.

Web of Science Chrome extension:
The new WoS extension allows you to conduct a search in WoS Core Collection or All Databases from within chrome while browsing the Internet.

For more information, see Clarivate Analytics’ What’s New LibGuide