Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Springer Expands Author Mapper

Springer's has added more content to its innovative application AuthorMapper.com. The company is now including eBook content in addition to the original journal content. From their press release:
Springer Science+Business Media has expanded its service on the website www.AuthorMapper.com, a free analytical online tool for discerning trends, patterns and subject experts within scientific research. AuthorMapper was launched a year ago offering searchable content from all Springer and BioMed Central journals. The platform now offers eBook data as well. Currently the tool can retrieve useful information across all disciplines, from more than three million journal articles and more than 742,000 book chapters from 29,000 eBooks. Adding eBook data allows all the benefits of specific eBook analysis just as the success of the journal data has shown in the past.
The AuthorMapper tool can provide a variety of analyses, such as keyword tag clouds and "Top 5" bar charts for various important metrics, and includes an interactive world map of the results. AuthorMapper.com’s advanced search function also allows complex queries using keyword, discipline, institution, journal, publisher and author. The results can identify new and historic scientific trends through timeline graphs and bar charts of top statistics, allowing for identification of trends in the literature, discovery of wider scientific relationships, and locating other experts in a field of study.

The trend timeline graph, for example, allows authors to see whether their area of expertise is growing or has already peaked. Users that are only interested in open access content can restrict their searches accordingly, and all search results provide link-outs to content on SpringerLink.For graduates, post-docs and emerging researchers, AuthorMapper.com shows which institutions are the most prolific in specific research areas and allows for their comparison. AuthorMapper.com can even be useful for members of the general public seeking to identify experts, for example, medical specialists, working close to where they are located.

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