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As more and more documents become available on the internet, finding documents that fit users’ needs is becoming increasingly important. A scientific document is a structured text and has some features that can be used to improve retrieval. This work first investigates the relationships among fonts, position, and cited references, and then uses them to design a novel retrieval method based on the discovered relationships. Empirical results show that using the location factor alone achieves the same performance as considering location and font factors simultaneously. Citation similarity is useful only when the similarity is high. Mayr P, Walter AK. An exploratory study of Google Scholar. Online Information Review 2007;31(6):814–830. (doi: 10.1108/14684520710841784) The purpose of the paper is to discuss the new scientific search service Google Scholar, born to search exclusively scholarly documents, and to test its functionality. The study, based on queries against different journal lists, showed some deficiencies in coverage and up-to-datedness of Google Scholar’s index and pointed out the most important sources of this kind of service, such as the commercial academic publishers, currently the main data providers. Through the analysis of a huge amount of data from this search engine, the study concludes that Google Scholar has some interesting pros but is not a substitute for specialized databases and catalogues. Nielsen FA. Scientific citations in Wikipedia. First Monday 2007;12(8) Wikipedia, the internet-based encyclopædia, is steadily growing in popularity within scientific research, but some critics have questioned the quality of entries. Citing Wikipedia as an authoritative source may be questionable: biased coverage and lack of sources are among the most common “Wikipedia risks.” This study examines outbound links from Wikipedia articles to articles in scientific journals and compares them against journal statistics from Journal Citation Reports, such as impact factors. The results show an increasing use of structured citation markup and good agreement with citation patterns seen in the scientific literature, though with a slight tendency to cite articles in high-impact journals such as Nature and Science. These results increase confidence in Wikipedia as a reliable information resource for science in general. De Moya-Anegón F, Chinchilla-Rodríguez Z, Vargas-Quesada B, Corera-Álvarez E, Muñoz-Fernández FJ, González-Molina A, Herrero-Solana V. Coverage analysis of Scopus: a journal metric approach. Scientometrics 2007;73(1):53–78. (doi: 10.1007/s11192-007-1681-4) The coverage of the Scopus database is compared with Ulrich’s Directory. The variables taken into account were subject distribution, geographical distribution, distribution by publishers, and the language of publication. The analysis of the coverage of a product of this nature should be done in relation to an accepted model, the optimal choice being Ulrich’s, considered the international point of reference for the most comprehensive information on journals published throughout the world. The results allow us to draw a profile of Scopus in terms of its coverage by areas – geographic and thematic – and the significance of peer review in its publications. Banks M. Access all theses. Physics World 2007;20(11):18–19. The time is ripe for a complete online database of PhD theses, and physicists should take a lead. © Copyright 2008 by European Association of Science Editors Top of Page |
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