Heigh ho, Heigh ho, it’s off data mining we go

As a publisher, we want to meet the needs of researchers and academics who interact with our site to ensure that we offer the best user experience and functionality possible. With this in mind, we began a project to facilitate text and data mining on emeraldinsight.com, following requests from individuals and institutions in recent months.

So what is text and data mining, or TDM as it is often shortened to? Well, it is the analysis of large bodies of work by a machine, to try and identify trends that would not ordinarily be picked up through usual ‘human’ reading. For example, the processing of data contained in a large collection of scientific papers in a particular medical field could suggest a possible link between a gene and a disease, or between a drug and an adverse effect – things that a human would never piece together after reading thousands of articles.

Mine

With so much amazing content on our site, it was an obvious decision to enable this functionality. Hopefully by doing so, it will spark further ideas and research and perhaps even change the world!.. Okay, we are maybe getting a bit ahead of ourselves, but it is still a good thing that it is now available.

Having investigated a number of different options as to how we could do this, we decided to go with a solution that involved the use of CrossRef’s TDM facility. This meant adding additional data into current and future deposits with CrossRef, along with depositing a huge tranche of historical information. So far, we have provided data for over 200,000 articles, and this number will continue to grow over forthcoming weeks. We have also enabled access to the equivalent number of machine-readable files on our site.

Users wishing to mine the site are encouraged to inform us of their intention to do so, so they are not automatically blocked by our system. There are also the usual access restrictions in place, so a user will still have to be a subscriber to the content. But aside from those minor caveats, we encourage our users to use the facility and mine for that one diamond of information that is just waiting to be discovered.

3-03-2017 |

Reading full books just got easier

The most recent development for users of book content on is now live on www.emeraldinsight.com in the form of full book download. All non-series book titles published from 2016 onward have the option to download the whole book title in PDF and ePub format. This is in addition to the pre-existing individual chapter download option. Not only will this provide more choice in how end users consume book content, the functionality will aid usage of the content which should make librarians even happier!

 

Work was carried out by the digital team and its business partners from Production and Customer Operations, helping to enable the required changes in the typesetting process, the implementation of the functionality on the site and the end to end testing.

Full Book DL

This development places the latest, highest value book titles in a great position for future product development, especially when considering potential new business models for Emerald’s customers.

2-14-2017 |

Feeding RePEc for content hungry economists

Knowing what researchers need in order to do their job is something that all publishers work towards. A part of that focuses on ensuring content on the subject matter they are researching is discover-able. Over the past year we’ve heard from economists who want to access our abstracts as part of the RePEc service and during the last few weeks we’ve been working to make this happen.

RePEc (Research Papers in Economics – http://repec.org/) is a volunteer maintained project that collects data from various sources, then serves the metadata to users through a variety of different services. Emerald used to provide journal data to the RePEc, but technical issues caused it to fall behind several years ago.

Now, with the new digital teams in place, we are working to get our latest article metadata onto RePEc’s database, with the first steps to make some of our more recent journal metadata available. This is already underway with the creation of a new FTP server, the sourcing and conversion of content which has been successfully tested with a batch of 41 journal titles. Following on from this, we are working to make an automated feed live in January to allow the flow of new journal metadata to reach RePEc faster and with minimal manual intervention. This will then be extended to Book metadata, to better serve the needs of economics researchers.

Watch this space for further updates!

12-20-2016 | 1

A new little feature for the Mendeley fans out there

We know that researchers love Mendeley – the free reference manager and academia’s answer to LinkedIn. Academics can use it to (in Mendeley’s words) “manage your research, showcase your work, connect and collaborate with over five million researchers worldwide”. So, if you’re a Mendeley fan, we want to make it as easy as possible for you to save an Emerald journal article or book chapter to your personal Mendeley library.

We had the option there to do that on Emerald Insight already, but it was hidden as a tiny social share button in the ‘plus others’ section of our social share list on article pages, so it was pretty hard to find. The first thing we’ve done to fix this is make the Mendeley button appear in that social share list, alongside the share to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn buttons down the right-hand column of the article pages.

The Mendeley button

However, the more interesting and useful thing we’ve done is create a big new button right at the top of the article page – you can’t really miss it! But here’s a screenshot to prove it anyway.

mendeley

So now it’s super quick and easy to save all your favourite Emerald journal articles straight to your Mendeley library. We’re still working on rolling the buttons out to book pages, but in the meantime, we hope you find this new little feature useful!

12-02-2016 |

Hello world!

The default WordPress greeting seems appropriate, so I’m going to leave it as it is. Hello World! This the new blog for Emeraldinsight.com, the publishing platform of Emerald Group Publishing.

We specialize in the publication of academic research in business and management fields, but also publish many journals and books in health care, engineering, and education.

What we aren’t is a typical STM publisher.

What we are aiming to be is a user-focused, agile development powerhouse for bringing innovation to scholarly communication and dissemination. This blog will document some of the trials and successes of that journey, and also function as an introduction to the major and minor product enhancements as they are released to the site. We’ll also be looking for feedback and beta-testers, so watch out for those calls soon.

Chris Leonard
Head of Product

 

5-10-2016 |