Monthly Archives: August 2011

First impressions of Google Scholar citations

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A first feedback, although it’s not open to everyone, yet. Since I heard about this upcoming service some time ago, I tested Google Scholar again, and I have to say I am very impressed with the progress they acomplished, the results seem to be much more relevant and precise. I stoped using it 2 or 3 years ago, Scopus becoming my favorite source.  I might reconsider it.

Open Access experience

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I just submitted my first paper to PLoS One. I’m curious to see how it goes. It turns out that we have some very intriguing results, which could be of interest for many and disparate scientific communities. Combined with my rising interest for open access journals, PLoS One seems to be a perfect fit. There are extremely few (I could not find one, actually) materials science papers in PLoS One, although they are open to any domains of science. This could be the first one, that might be fun. Let’s see.

Wikipedia article traffic statistics

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Just discovered this site, where you can get the traffic statistics for individual wikipedia articles. A list of the most consulted articles has been computed (not up to date, though), but I am more interested in the traffic of highly specialized articles, like scientific ones. An example of alternative metrics ? I long for the day when we will replace the impact factor with the usage factor.

(Soure: Hacker News)

Computing giants launch free science metrics

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Hope for a free alternative to Scopus or WoK ? Will this only be a metrics tool ? If that’s the case, I don’t really care…. What they (Google and MS) need is to improve the accuracy of their database and search tools; I have always found Scopus to be far more accurate and relevant than Google Scholar, so far. I’m curious to see how it evolves.

I was not aware of the Microsoft Academic Search. Materials science is not covered yet, alas.

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