Colloquium - West

By putting the world's scholarly literature online, publisher websites and digital archives have made millions articles instantly available anywhere, any time, in digital form. This is a breakthrough in document delivery; we now await comparable breakthroughs in document discovery. As de Solla Price noted in 1965, the scholarly literature forms a vast network -- where the nodes are the millions of papers published in scholarly journals and the links are the hundreds of millions of citations connecting these papers. Can we use this vast network of trails, in combination with intelligent algorithms, to help researchers navigate the scholarly landscape? Can we develop research tools that not only deliver the content but facilitate the content? New approaches to measuring, mapping and evaluating documents are creating new forms of value that can be derived from the digital research content already available to the research community. In this presentation, I will talk about the Eigenfactor Project and the tools we have developed to rank and map scientific knowledge.

Jevin West is a Post-Doctoral researcher in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. His research focuses on citation networks. In this type of network, an edge represents a citation and a node represents a journal, author or paper. These networks contain millions of nodes and hundreds of millions citations. The primary aim of his research is to use the structure of these well preserved networks to better assess and to better navigate the ever expanding scholarly universe. He is the head developer of Eigenfactor.org -- a free website for librarians, researchers, publishers, administrators and editors that ranks and maps scholarly journals. Jevin's most recent projects involve collaborations to further develop these tools on article level data using digital repositories like JSTOR, Microsoft Academic Search and the Social Science Research Network at Harvard.

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