[Nhcoll-l] Small collections make a big impact -- Methods

[Kevin Winker]

Thanks to the many who have written expressing an interest in our recent
Correspondence piece of this title in Nature (
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v493/n7433/full/493480b.html, or write
to me and I will send a pdf). We've received many queries about our methods
in creating an effective collection-specific Google Scholar profile and
have written up these details (copied below).

Regards,
-- 
Kevin Winker
University of Alaska Museum
907 Yukon Drive
Fairbanks, AK 99775

*Creation of the UAM.birds Google Scholar profile* started with the
creation of a separate email account (UAM.birds at gmail.com). We were not
able to create an additional profile within a personal email account; the
profile offered by Google Scholar is relatively unyielding to manipulation.
Hence, we basically co-opted Google Scholar to make it think UAM birds was
an individual.

            The next step involved populating the profile with papers that
used UAM birds. This progressed through several avenues. First, the
department already had a list of papers using UAM birds going back
approximately a decade for use in NSF proposals. These papers had been
pre-vetted to ensure their use of the UAM bird collection and could be
added easily, albeit manually, by searching by lead author name in the
“add” function. Second, we searched for older papers written by the past
curator and collections manager, reasoning that their work would contain a
substantial percentage of papers using the UAM bird collection. Third, we
checked the acknowledgments and information provided in field guides and
authoritative published works on western North American birds looking for
evidence of UAM contributions. Effort was concentrated on what we
considered to be more important works rather than simply combing all
possible literature (our list may not be complete). These searches were
slower and depended more heavily on institutional knowledge. However, a
number of the most heavily cited publications were found in this way.

            Once we felt that we had found most of the possible citations
and had added them to the Google Scholar profile, we proofed our work.
First, we downloaded them into an Excel file using the “export” function.
We then manually went through this file and categorized publications by the
method in which they had used the UAM bird collection. These modes of use
consisted of three categories: direct use of one or more UAM bird
specimens, depositing bird specimens that had been obtained in the study at
UAM, or use of the information contained in and associated with the
collection. These are not mutually exclusive categories, and many
publications fell into more than one of these use categories.

            Google Scholar does not have much in the way of citation
quality control. It frequently attributes authors to papers when they in
fact have only some tangential relationship to the paper. It also often has
multiple citations for the same paper. These can be merged using the
“merge” function. Often the profile will need to be sorted by
“Title/Author” to get duplicates on the same page (it doesn’t appear that
you can carry a selected citation through page changes to merge papers on
different pages; it also helps to show 100 citations per page and not 20).
The bottom line is that each citation should be vetted to make sure its
inclusion is appropriate. Certain publications (e.g., 7th edition of the
AOU checklist, Phillips *Known Birds of North and Middle America*) do not
appear to be cited as much as they should. We had to enter these manually,
and although they are correctly entered there may be enough variation in
the way they are cited that Google Scholar has a hard time recognizing all
the variations.

            We hope to see other collections adopt this method as a way to
look beyond use statistics (e.g., loans, research visits, etc.) and gain
greater understanding about how often the products of that use are then
used themselves in the larger scientific publication enterprise. That said,
while this approach has some merits, we have to be careful in putting too
much reliance on it. For example, a basic taxonomic revision is usually
cited less frequently than a paper on a popular topic, so the scientific
importance of a publication may not be measurable by citations alone.
Nevertheless, this new metric of a collection’s impact may be useful when
making a case for continuing or increasing support for collections as
important scientific infrastructure with considerable impact.



Jack Withrow and Kevin Winker
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/nhcoll-l/attachments/20130209/f2980422/attachment.html