Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, January 13, 2007

Data-mining PubMed for author information

Authoratory is a tool for data-mining information about authors with articles cited on PubMed Central.  From the site:

The content of Authoratory is produced by analyzing large amounts of data from PubMed....

Authoratory data-mining techniques make it possible to discover new information about the authors - the information that is not apparent by reviewing one or two of their articles. For each selected author Authoratory gives the following:

  • the author status: primary or non-primary (primary author publishes articles independently, while non-primary always publishes articles with another author or a group of authors)
  • the list of most frequent coauthors (navigate the social network between the authors using their join publications)
  • professional interests (as indicated by the MeSH keywords and by the statistical analysis of abstracts and publication titles)
  • the author's affiliated institution and contact information
  • the change of all these parameters across time
Authoratory keyword search is unique as well. It uses keyword frequencies to rank authors against each other. The more papers the particular author publishes for a specific keyword, the higher his rank is in the keyword listings. With Authoratory keyword search it 's possible to quickly find all authors with the expertise in a specific narrow topic....