Webinar on academic SEO and Open Knowledge Maps: transcript

Key points

• Getting an overview of a new field usually means searching, reading a highly cited review and its references, which can take weeks or months.
• About 2.5 million research articles are published each year, and citation gaps are large: up to 85% of data sets are never cited.
• In medicine, moving research into clinical practice takes about 17 years on average.
• Open Knowledge Maps is a charitable nonprofit that proposes knowledge maps instead of lists, showing main areas with relevant articles attached.
• Users can build maps from PubMed or BASE, browse topic bubbles, read open access PDFs and add collaborative annotations.
• The project shares source code under an MIT license, maps under Creative Commons and data as CC0, and develops its roadmap openly.

Chapters

1. 0:00Discovery practices and getting an overview of a field
2. 1:38Information overload and the broken discovery process
3. 3:15Open Knowledge Maps and its mission
4. 5:20Live demo: creating a knowledge map
5. 7:19Advantages and open science principles

Full transcript

0:00We'll look into discovery tools, also getting to know open knowledge maps at this point, and we will learn how the whole open science discovery ecosystem works. And then we will use this information in order to ensure that your research is more visible online. all right so let's start with the discovery practices and one of the most basic discovery tasks that many of us have to do many times throughout our career is that we need to get an overview of a new field be it that you're starting out in your PhD or that you're venturing into a neighboring field writing an interdisciplinary research proposal for example this is really a task that comes up quite often and what many people do is that they turn to their favorite search engine for example Google's Cora and then they type in the name of the field in this example

1:00educational technology and then they get hundreds of thousands if not millions of results and since you cannot read 2.5 million research papers you mostly turn to a highly cited overview work like this one, go through it, go through the references, maybe also look at the citing literature to get an idea of what the newest works are in this area. And with time and patience, you can then build a mental model of the field. That is, you know the most important topics, you know the most important authors, you know the most important journals.

1:38The downside, of course, is that this process takes very long. Weeks, if not months, and in most PhD studies, the very first year is dedicated to this process. So I think we all feel a bit like these poor people here. We're just swamped with the literature. 2.5 million research articles are published each year, and that makes it very hard to get an overview of a field, and once you have it, to then keep it. And this is difficult for people inside academia, but it gets exponentially harder when you step outside of academia, because then you cannot ask your colleagues, for example, or experts because you simply don't know where they are and how to talk to them and we also see this represented in the numbers so in terms of unsightedness we have unsightedness rate between 12 and 82 percent depending on the field this gets even worse when we're talking about the

2:39unsightedness of data so this was a piece of research that I was involved in as well and And there we found that up to 85% of research articles are actually, of data sets are never cited. And finally, where it gets really bleak is the transfer to practice, because even in an application-oriented discipline such as medicine, only a small amount of research is ever transferred from basic research to clinical practice. And in this example, they found that it takes an overall, on average, 17 years.

3:15So, at the moment, the discovery process is really broken and there are many tools and initiatives now coming up who are trying to provide solutions for this problem that we simply cannot stay on top of the literature anymore. And one of these initiatives is Open Knowledge Maps. And we are a charitable nonprofit organization. and we're dedicated to dramatically improving the visibility of scientific knowledge we want to do that for science but also for all the other stakeholders in society and our proposal is now to use knowledge maps instead of lists for discovery and in a knowledge map you have many advantages over a list for example you get the main areas at the glance so in this example risk factors types of diseases and prevention and relevant articles are already attached to each of the areas so you can get immediately started

4:20And our mission is now to create a visual interface to the world's scientific knowledge that is based on these knowledge maps. And we really want to revolutionize discovery and not do this for a single domain or a single discipline, but for all of science and research. And finally, we want to turn discovery into a collaborative process. because let's face it whenever you have a discovery task someone else already had it before you and they already have that knowledge for example this overview of educational technology but it's mostly in your head and it's not really expressed in a way that others can use and reuse it so this is the theory now I'd like to show you the practice so if you go to our website open knowledge maps.org then you can create a knowledge map of your own and you can choose

5:20between two different integrations we have pubmed the big database in the biomedical sciences and life sciences and base the Bielefeld academic search engine which is a meta aggregator over almost 140 million scientific documents So here you can search in our disciplines and I'm going to use digital education here as an example. And when you click on Go, we then create the knowledge map for you, and it looks quite similar to the example that I showed you beforehand, in that the bubbles represent the sub-areas. So, for example, here, education systems, digital competence, digital literacy, and once you've found a bubble that you're really interested in, like digital literacy, for example, you can then look at the articles that are attached to it, you can look at the metadata, and once you found a paper that you're really interested in you can then also

6:20look at the PDF of course only if it's open access and so you can see the full paper here and talked earlier about collaborative features so the first collaborative feature that we have implemented is that we have an open annotation system here that's collaborative so you can add your highlights and your comments and you can share it with yourself or with the world So, this is Open Knowledge Maps in a nutshell. The advantages that we see is that you can get this bird's eye view of a field, that you can identify relevant concepts. So, this is often one of the most difficult tasks in discovery is to understand which words you're actually going to use for your search.

7:19You can sort the relevant from the irrelevant. That means if you're only interested in digital literacy, then you can stay within that bubble and branch out only later. And finally, while Open Knowledge Maps is an interface of all scientific knowledge, open and closed, we'll always make it very easy to get to the open content and we will always add additional services like this Open annotation service by hypothesis yeah we're open science all the way so all of our source code is shared under an MIT license on github all of our maps are creative comments by that means you can freely use and reuse them you only have to give us attribution and all of our data is cc0 that means it's in the public domain the moment it's really hard to get to it so we're working with initiatives like Wikidata to improve that.

8:18And we're also working in the open. We have an open roadmap, we publish many of our proposals openly, and we're working towards participatory development. That means that we're integrating our users and stakeholders in the development process. When I say we, I mean a core team of dedicated volunteers. And we also have the NOS Center as an organizational member. And recently we were...

Source and licence

Recording: File:190306 webinar peter kraker academic seo.ogv by Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. (2019-03-06), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.