Shirley Ainsworth

Web visibility or wasted opportunity? Case studies from Mexican research institutes

Purpose – This paper aims to determine to what extent the scientific production and research activities of a group of National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) research institutes in the sciences, social sciences and humanities are visible on the internet with a view to identifying areas where web presence is not optimal so improvements can be made.Design/methodology/approach – The authors do this by analysing the relevant information on their web sites and by comparing institutional listings of scientific production between 2005 and 2006, with papers reported in the international, multidisciplinary online services of the Web of Science and Scopus, as well as in Clase and Periodica which cover production in Latin American journals.Findings – Results indicate general poor visibility of research activities and production in the institutional web sites with only limited access to full text articles. Web sites of the institutes in the sciences score better than those in the humanities and social science...

Hermes, the information messenger. Integrating information services and delivering them to the end user

The boom of the internet during the last 10 years has produced an accelerated and slightly chaotic growth in information services. User frustration with multiple databases, confusing interfaces, bewildering query languages, search protocols, and differing results formats has also increased. These services need to be both integrated and homogenized. Hermes is a research tool that uses specially designed acquisition, parsing and presentation methods to integrate information resources, from searching in disparate bibliographic databases, to accessing the full text articles online, and developing a web of information associated with each reference, via one seamless common interface. The system has been developed with Open Source software and has a Web interface. At present it searches 17 bibliographic databases on several different platforms, and delivers results from more than 7,000 full text electronic journals. We also discuss the obstacles that exist for the development of this kind of tool, due to the lack of acceptance and implementation of standards, and compare Hermes with other similar projects.

Has hosting on science direct improved the visibility of Latin American scholarly journals? A preliminary analysis of data quality

Latin American regional journals have adopted measures to increase both their quality and visibility, among which figures the promotion of their inclusion in international databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. An increasing number have recently taken advantage of the support and hosting services offered by Elsevier on the Science Direct (SD) platform, with the expectation of achieving this goal. The present study takes a preliminary look at the tendencies in the coverage in these databases of a sample of open access Latin American journals hosted on SD in June 2016 and their metadata, to typify the most common errors which can affect the use of performance indicators in individual and institutional evaluations and the integration of authors into scholarly reputation systems. A significant level of these errors was found relating to such aspects as journal coverage, duplicate records, reference data and links to full text, in addition to conventions concerning author names and titles that adversely affect retrieval of articles and the correct assignation of author credit and of citations, suggesting that present strategies have yet to deliver the expected results.