Lee Miller writes
> The simplest way to aggregate papers within disciplines would be include a
> discipline field in the metadata. This gets back to the problems of subject
> classification, but at the discipline level a short list of defined
> discipline descriptors should be sufficient.
>
> For example, the discipline of ecology includes plants, animals,
> microorganisms, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, physical environments,
> physiology, applied mathematics, and many other sub-fields. Nevertheless,
> ecologists of all stripes recognize and enjoy common bonds in the general
> discipline. A small number of general journals that publish papers from
> many of the sub-disciplines are followed by many researchers and academics,
> regardless of their specialty fields. Thus inclusion of the discipline
> desciptor "ecology" would allow aggregation of papers at a level that has
> already proved useful to ecologists for over a century.
>
> A similar level of aggregation in other fields would surely be useful as a
> tool for harvesting papers of particular interest from institutional archives.
Yes, but this is not what I think is the prime task of aggregator
services. Your thinking is that such services will make it easier
for users to find papers belonging to a certain discipline. Within
that thinking I agree there is scope for value-added user services.
For example, once you have identified all paper is the area
of ecology, you can start something like "NEP: New Ecology
Papers". That is, you can mail a list of all the new papers
that have appeared within the subject of ecology out to
editors (who would be working as volunteers) and then have
them filter those papers that belong to microorganisms,
terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, etc, and forward the
paper discriptions to a list of subscribers who are interested
in those subjects. Such a system already works well with
RePEc, see
http://nep.repec.org.
But: such value added services for users are not the main
function of aggregators, imho. Aggregators are more about
serving the authors of papers. They should be conceived
as instruments to incentivize authors to contribute to
formal archives.
With greetings from Minsk, Belarus,
Thomas Krichel
http://openlib.org/home/krichel
RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Received on Sun Mar 16 2003 - 17:38:40 GMT