[Sigmetrics] 1findr: research discovery & analytics platform

Anne-Wil Harzing anne at harzing.com
Tue Apr 24 17:11:29 EDT 2018 

Dear all,

I was asked (with a _very short time-frame_) to comment on 1Findr for an 
article in Nature (which I am not sure has actually appeared). I was 
given temporary login details for the Advanced interface.

As "per normal" with these kind of requests only one of my comments was 
actually used. So I am posting all of them here in case they are of use 
to anyone (and to Eric and his team in fine-tuning the system).

================

As I had a very limited amount of time to provide my comments, I tried 
out 1Findr by searching for my own name (I have about 150 publications 
including journal articles, books, book chapters, software, web 
publications and white papers) and some key terms in my own field 
(international management).


  What I like

Simple and intuitive user interface with fast response to search 
requests, much faster than with some competitor products where the 
website takes can take ages to load. The flexibility of the available 
search options clearly reflects the fact that this is an offering built 
by people with a background in Scientometrics.

A search for my own name showed that coverage at the author level is 
good, it finds more of my publications than both the Web of Science and 
Scopus, but fewer than Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic. It is 
approximately on par with CrossRef and Dimensions though all three 
services (CR, Dimensions and Findr) have unique publications that the 
other service doesn’t cover.

As far as I could assess, topic searches worked well with flexible 
options to search in title, keywords and abstracts. However, I have not 
tried these in detail.

Provides a very good set of subjects for filtering searches that – for 
the disciplines I can evaluate – shows much better knowledge of academic 
disciplines and disciplinary boundaries than is reflected in some 
competitor products. I particularly like the fact that there is more 
differentiation in the Applied Sciences, the Economic and Social 
Sciences and Arts & Humanities than in some other databases. This was 
sorely needed.

There is a quick summary of Altmetrics such as tweets, Facebook postings 
and Mendeley readers. Again I like the fact that a simple presentation 
is used, rather than the “bells & whistle” approach with the flashy 
graphics of some other providers. This keeps the website snappy and 
provides an instant overview.

There is good access to OA versions and a “1-click” download of all 
available OA versions [for a maximum of 40 publications at once as this 
is the upper limit of the number of records on a page]. I like the fact 
that it finds OA versions from my personal website (www.harzing.com 
<http://www.harzing.com>) as well as OA versions in university 
repositories and gold OA versions. However, it doesn’t find all OA 
versions of my papers (see dislike below).


  What I dislike

Although I like the fact that Findr doesn’t try to be anything and 
everything leading to a cluttered user interface, for me the fact that 
it doesn’t offer citation metrics limits its usefulness. Although I 
understand its focus is on finding literature (which is fair enough) 
many academics – rightly or wrongly – use citations scores to assess 
which articles to prioritize articles for downloading and reading.

The fact that it doesn’t yet find all Open Access versions that Google 
Scholar and Microsoft Academic do. All my publications are available in 
OA on my website, but Findr does not seem to find all of them. Findr 
also doesn’t seem to source OA versions from ResearchGate. Also several 
OA versions resulted in a /“//404. The requested resource is not found.”/

The fact that it only seems to cover journal articles. None of my books, 
book chapters, software, white papers or web publications were found. 
Although a focus on peer-reviewed work is understandable I think 
coverage of books and book chapters is essential and services like 
Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic and CrossRef do cover books.


  Niggles

There are duplicate results for quite a few of my articles, usually 
“poorer” versions (i.e. without full text/abstract/altmetric scores) it 
would be good if the duplicates could be removed and only the “best” 
version kept

Automatic stemming of searches is awkward if you try to search for 
author names in the “general” search (as many users will do). In my case 
(Harzing) it results in hundreds of articles on the Harz mountains 
obscuring all of my output.

Preferred search syntax should be clearer as many users will search 
authors with initials only (as this is what works best in other 
databases). In Findr this provides very few results as there are “exact” 
matches only, whereas in other databases initial searches are 
interpreted as initial + wildcard.

More generally needs better author disambiguation. Some of my articles 
can only be found when searching for a-w harzing, a very specific 
rendition of my name.

When Exporting Citations the order seems to reverts to alphabetical 
order of the first author, not the order that was on the screen.


Best wishes,
Anne-Wil

*Prof. Anne-Wil Harzing*
Professor of International Management
Middlesex University London, Business School

*Web:* Harzing.com <https://harzing.com> - *Twitter:* @awharzing 
<https://twitter.com/awharzing> - *Google Scholar: *Citation Profile 
<https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=v0sDYGsAAAAJ>
*New:* Latest blog post <https://harzing.com/blog/.latest?redirect> - 
*Surprise:* Random blog post <https://harzing.com/blog/.random> - 
*Finally:* Support Publish or Perish 
<https://harzing.com/resources/publish-or-perish/donations>

On 24/04/2018 21:51, Bosman, J.M. (Jeroen) wrote:
> Of course there is much more to say about 1Findr. What I have seen so 
> far is that the coverage back to 1944 is very much akin to Dimensions, 
> probably because both are deriving the bulk of their records from 
> Crossref.
>
> Full text search is relatively rare among these systems. Google 
> Scholar does it. Dimensions does it on a subset. And some publisher 
> platform support it, as do some OA aggragators.
>
> Apart from these two aspects (coverage and full text search support), 
> there are a lot of aspects and (forthcoming) 1Findr functionalities 
> that deserve scrutiny, not least the exact method of OA detection (and 
> version priority) of course.
>
> Jeroen Bosman
> Utrecht University Library
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* SIGMETRICS [sigmetrics-bounces at asist.org] on behalf of David 
> Wojick [dwojick at craigellachie.us]
> *Sent:* Tuesday, April 24, 2018 8:59 PM
> *To:* Mark C. Wilson
> *Cc:* sigmetrics at mail.asis.org
> *Subject:* Re: [Sigmetrics] 1findr: research discovery & analytics 
> platform
>
> There is a joke that what is called "rapid prototyping" actually means 
> fielding the beta version. In that case every user is a beta tester.
>
> It is fast and the filter numbers are useful in themselves. Some of 
> the hits are a bit mysterious. It may have unique metric capabilities. 
> Too bad that advanced search is not available for free.
>
> David
>
> At 02:34 PM 4/24/2018, Mark C. Wilson wrote:
>> Searching for my own papers I obtained some wrong records and the 
>> link to arXiv was broken. It does return results very quickly and 
>> many are useful. I am not sure whether 1science intended to use 
>> everyone in the world as beta-testers.
>>
>>> On 25/04/2018, at 06:16, David Wojick <dwojick at craigellachie.us 
>>> <mailto:dwojick at craigellachie.us> > wrote:
>>>
>>> It appears not to be doing full text search, which is a significant 
>>> limitation. I did a search on "chaotic" for 2018 and got 527 hits. 
>>> Almost all had the term in the title and almost all of the remainder 
>>> had it in the abstract. Normally with full text, those with the term 
>>> only in the text are many times more than those with it in title, 
>>> often orders of magnitude more.
>>>
>>> But the scope is impressive, as is the ability to filter for OA.
>>>
>>> David
>>>
>>> David Wojick, Ph.D.
>>> Formerly Senior Consultant for Innovation
>>> DOE OSTI https://www.osti.gov/ <https://www.osti.gov/>
>>>
>>>
>>> At 08:00 AM 4/24/2018, you wrote:
>>>> Content-Language: en-US
>>>> Content-Type: multipart/related;
>>>>          type="multipart/alternative";
>>>> boundary="----=_NextPart_001_00EE_01D3DBBD.BC977220"
>>>>
>>>> Greetings everyone,
>>>>
>>>> Today, 1science announced the official launch of 1findr, its 
>>>> platform for research discovery and analytics. Indexing 90 million 
>>>> articles­of which 27 million are available in OA­it represents 
>>>> the largest curated collection worldwide of scholarly research. The 
>>>> platform aims to include all articles published in peer-reviewed 
>>>> journals, in all fields of research, in all languages and from 
>>>> every country.
>>>>
>>>> Here are a few resources if you’re interested in learning more:
>>>>
>>>> •           p;  Access 1findr platform: www.1findr.com 
>>>> <http://www.1findr.com/>
>>>> •           p;  Visit the 1findr website: www.1science.com/1findr 
>>>> <http://www.1science.com/1findr>
>>>> •           p;  Send in your questions: 1findr at 1science.com 
>>>> <mailto:1findr at 1science.com>
>>>> •           p;  See the press release: 
>>>> www.1science.com/1findr-public-launch 
>>>> <http://www.1science.com/1findr-public-launch>
>>>>
>>>> Sincerely,
>>>>
>>>> Grégoire
>>>>
>>>> *Grégoire Côté
>>>> *President | Président
>>>> *Science-Metrix
>>>> *1335, Mont-Royal E
>>>> Montréal, QC  H2J 1Y6
>>>> Canada
>>>>
>>>> <16bac2d.png> 
>>>> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/science-metrix-inc><16bac3d.png> 
>>>> <https://twitter.com/ScienceMetrix>
>>>> T. 1.514.495.6505 x115
>>>> T. 1.800.994.4761
>>>> F. 1.514.495.6523
>>>> _gregoire.cote at science-metrix.com 
>>>> <mailto:gregoire.cote at science-metrix.com>
>>>> _www.science-metrix.com <http://www.science-metrix.com/>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
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