Helen Atkins of PLoS describes how Access Innovations' Data Harmony indexing software was used to help PLoS editorial teams analyse data for the PLOS ONE website, http://www.plosone.org/.

1. Taxonomy Analysis to Support Key
Decision Making
Helen Atkins
Director, Publishing Services
11 February 2014
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2. Overview
• Some background on PLOS
• Goals of the project
• Historic data indexing
• Analysis of coverage over time
• Visualizing the results
• Decision support
• Additional projects in process or planning
– Next year’s presentation topic?

3. Who is PLOS?
• Ten years old
• The largest not-for-profit Open Access publisher
– 4,500 submissions per month
• The publisher of seven Open Access journals
• Based in San Francisco, US, and
Cambridge, UK
• Self-sustaining since late 2010
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4. 4
PLOS Biology
October, 2003
PLOS Medicine
October, 2004
PLOS Community Journals
June-September, 2005 October, 2007
PLOS ONE
December,
2006

5. PLOS ONE: The World’s First Mega-journal
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• Editorial criteria
• Scientifically rigorous
• Ethical
• Properly reported
• Conclusions supported by the data
• Editors and reviewers do not ask
• How important is the work?
• Which is the relevant audience?
• Everything that deserves to be published, will be published
• Therefore, the journal is not artificially limited in size
• Use online tools to sort and filter scholarly content after
publication, not before

6. Goals of the Project
• Identify areas of strength for each journal
– Confirm journals’ scopes against actual coverage
• Identify areas of emerging growth
– Shifting from original scope?
– Opportunities for new development, expansion?
• Using data on patterns of general literature
growth, determine:
– Where are we strong compared to the market?
– Where might we be lagging behind?
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7. Historic Indexing
• Project was developed with Access Innovations
• Using the PLOS taxonomy
– Indexed PLOS published articles from 2007 through
June, 2013
• 85,000 PLOS records
– Indexed a large commercial A&I database
• 25,000,000 records
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8. Visualizing the Results
• Partnered with Kevin Boyack and Map of Science
to develop visual representations of the data
• Very high-level look at the results for PLOS ONE
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9. THESAURUS BASEMAP
Circle size - # documents
Circle color – top level term
Many small circles – detailed thesaurus
and rule base that differentiates
Few large circles – broad terms and
rule base that doesn’t differentiate

10. ANALYSES
PLoS One – All years
PLoS One (2008)
PLoS One (2009)
PLoS One (2010)
PLoS One (2011)
PLoS One (2012)
PLoS One (2013)

11. ANALYSES
PLoS One – All years
PLoS One (2008)
PLoS One (2009)
PLoS One (2010)
PLoS One (2011)
PLoS One (2012)
PLoS One (2013)

12. ANALYSES
PLoS One – All years
PLoS One (2008)
PLoS One (2009)
PLoS One (2010)
PLoS One (2011)
PLoS One (2012)
PLoS One (2013)

13. ANALYSES
PLoS One – All years
PLoS One (2008)
PLoS One (2009)
PLoS One (2010)
PLoS One (2011)
PLoS One (2012)
PLoS One (2013)

14. ANALYSES
PLoS One – All years
PLoS One (2008)
PLoS One (2009)
PLoS One (2010)
PLoS One (2011)
PLoS One (2012)
PLoS One (2013)

15. ANALYSES
PLoS One – All years
PLoS One (2008)
PLoS One (2009)
PLoS One (2010)
PLoS One (2011)
PLoS One (2012)
PLoS One (2013)

16. ANALYSES
PLoS One (2007-2011)
PLoS One (2008)
PLoS One (2009)
PLoS One (2010)
PLoS One (2011)
PLoS One (2012)
PLoS One (2013)

17. Analysis of Coverage Over Time
• Spreadsheet data analysis
– Where is the literature growing faster than average?
• Is PLOS ONE coverage also growing? If not,
• Are we missing opportunities?
• Are these areas out of current scope?
– Areas of strength in coverage
• Also added to our coverage analysis data on online
use, citation rates, acceptance rates, and other metrics
– Emerging growth areas
• Where is PLOS ONE coverage growing faster than its overall
growth?
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18. Decision Support
• Editorial
– Is stated scope solid? Does it need to be
updated, expanded, revised?
– Expanding areas may need increased support
• Marketing
– Campaigns to increase submissions in selected areas
– Identify conferences to attend to increase exposure to
potential authors/editors
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19. Decision Support - Example
Ecology & Environmental Sciences
9% of all ONE articles have been tagged as Ecol/Env Sci
Areas accounting for the most articles are in the level 2 topics listed below.
Although it is still a small portion of the journal overall, this is a general area of
growth in ONE.
Community ecology: community structure, food web structure
Ecosystems: forests, deserts
Microbial ecology
Paleoecology
Physiological ecology
Population ecology
Opportunities for growth where ONE growth is slow relative to the literature:
Agroecology
Coastal ecology
Conservation genetics
Environmental economics
Nature-society interactions
Systems ecology
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20. Additional Applications in the Works
• Using taxonomic analysis
– To help identify submissions likely to be rejected
– To match people (editors, reviewers) and manuscripts
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