Carl Bergstrom's presentation from Microsoft's Big Scholarly Data workshop held in Redmond 7/10/2015. The presentation makes the argument that the scholarly community is far too dependent on Google Scholar for the vital task of searching the scientific literature. Google scholar uses an unknown algorithm on an unknown corpus and allows neither extension nor community development. Moreover, it may not persist forever. As a step toward a solution, I propose that the scholarly community take charge of its output. Creating an open repository of full text for all of scientific publication faces copyright issues that will be intractable in the short term, but creating an open citation graph for all of science is feasible today. At the Eigenfactor Project, we specialize in using citation networks to reveal the scientific landscape. I provide a series of quick illustrations of the kinds of things we can do with large-scale citation data.

1. Big Scholarly Data Workshop
Microsoft Conference Center
July 10th 2015
Navigating science using
citation networks
CarlT. Bergstrom and Jevin West
University of Washington

2. Photo:Michael Kareken

3. Exponentially increasing literature
rescholarly literature
Robert Aboukhalil (2014)

4. How do we sort through the
onslaught of papers and find the
ones we actually need to read?
Unknown stock image

5. The journal browsing model is
broken, and in its place we
increasingly rely on a single tool…
Photo: Special Libraries Association

7. • Which runs an unknown proprietary algorithm
• On an unspecified corpus
• With no potential for customization
• Or experimentation
• Or community development

8. There’s no guarantee it is going to stay around…

9. And there’s no
guarantee that big
publishing wants to
let it stay around.

10. stock image

11. The problem of finding what papers we
need to be reading is much too important
to leave to a Google 20% time project
with an uncertain future.
So what do we do ?

12. We must take
ownership of own
scholarly output

13. Full text
Citation
network
Unknown stock(?) image
well-formed.eigenfactor.org

14. Full text
Unknown stock(?) image

15. No legal
obstacle
Citation
network
well-formed.eigenfactor.org

16. But this is an insanely big job!
100 million papers
1 billion citations
Typing at 100 words a minute, 24 hours a day, 365 days a
week, it would take me around 100 years to type the reference
for each paper. If I could enter 10 citations a minute, it would
take me another 300 years to enter the full citation list.

19. Assemble citation networks using
data from many sources

20. The Eigenfactor Algorithm

21. Study, and publicize, the
economics of journal subscriptions
Eigenfactor.org

22. Study, and publicize, the economic
effectiveness of open access publishing
Eigenfactor.org

23. The map equation
Mapequation.org

24. good maps simplify
and highlight
relevant structures
Eigenfactor.org

25. Rosvall and Bergstrom (2011)
PLoS One

26. Rosvall and Bergstrom (2008) PNAS

27. “coverage” Impact factor
Althouse et al (2009) JASIST

28. Rosvall and Bergstrom (2011)
PLoS One

29. Eigenfactor.org

30. 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000
0.100.150.200.250.30
percentageofwomen
What gender disparities remain
in scholarly publishing?
last author
first author
West et al. 2013 PLoS One

31. Rosvall and Bergstrom (2010)
PLoS One

32. Vilhena et al. (2014)

33. Scholarly article recommendation as a service
http://recommends.eigenfactor.org

34. Eigenfactor Recommendation Lab
A-B testing,API for results, algorithm plug-in
recommends.eigenfactor.org