Mobilizing Usage Data: Scholarly Metrics and Recommender Systems

Johan Bollen

Associate Professor
Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing

Friday, 22 October 2010

9:30-10:00 a.m.
Coffee and Pastry Reception

10:00-11:30 a.m.
Presentation and Discussion

OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.
Kilgour Building—Auditorium
6565 Kilgour Place
Dublin, OH 43017-3395

This presentation is free and open to the public.

Overview of Presentation

Scholarly communication has become increasingly mediated by online services. The usage logs of these services have opened new possibilities for scholarly impact assessment and advanced services to support scholarship. In this presentation, Johan Bollen will present the outcomes of two distinct lines of research related to the mobilization of large-scale, scholarly usage data. Bollen will provide an overview of the MESUR project which started in 2006 with the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The MESUR project has over the course of the past three years aggregated a very large-scale collection of usage data donated by some of the world's most significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia. On the basis of this usage data MESUR conducted a scientific research program that yielded detailed maps of science and a scientific survey of a wide range of novel impact metrics. The latter result showed the limitations of the present citation-based model of scholarly assessment and the promise of usage-based assessment in this domain. Recent developments have placed the MESUR project on a path towards a more open, sustainable and community-supported framework. Bollen will also discuss the possibility of novel services to support digital scholarship on the basis of large-scale, near real-time usage data. A development that he and his collaborators started before MESUR has over the past couple of years independently grown into a new recommender platform to support scholarly research. He will discuss the basic principles underlying such usage-based recommender services and will explore the tremendous potential that resides in such systems to accelerate the pace of scholarly discovery.

Biography of Presenter

Johan Bollen is an Associate Professor at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. He was a Staff Scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 2005-2009, and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of Old Dominion University from 2002 to 2005. He obtained his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Brussels in 2001 on the subject of cognitive models of human hypertext navigation. He has taught courses on Data Mining, Information Retrieval and Digital Libraries. His research has been funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Science Foundation, Library of Congress, National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. His present research interests are usage data mining, complex networks, computational sociometrics, informetrics, and digital libraries. He has extensively published on these subjects as well as matters relating to adaptive information systems. He is presently the Principal Investigator of the MESUR project.

Additional Information

Johan Bollen
http://informatics.indiana.edu/jbollen/Home.html

Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research
http://cnets.indiana.edu/

MESUR: MEtrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources
http://www.mesur.org/MESUR.html

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