Today we released Beta 10 of SciPlore MindMapping. There are no new features but SciPlore MindMapping should run now smoothly with Linux and MacOS. I guess, there will be still some problems but you certainly will tell us if that’s the case (at least I hope so) 
I am currently in Toronto presenting our new paper titled “On the Robustness of Google Scholar against Spam” at Hypertext 2010. The paper is about some experiments we did on Google Scholar to find out how reliable their citation data etc. is. The paper soon will be downloadable on our publication page but for now i will post a pre-print version of that paper here in the blog:
In this research-in-progress paper we present the current results of several experiments in which we analyzed whether spamming Google Scholar is possible. Our results show, it is possible: We ‘improved’ the ranking of articles by manipulating their citation counts and we made articles appear in searchers for keywords the articles did not originally contained by placing invisible text in modified versions of the article.
Researchers should have an interest in having their articles indexed by Google Scholar and other academic search engines such as CiteSeer(X). The inclusion of their articles in the index improves the ability to make their articles available to the academic community. In addition, authors should not only be concerned about the fact that their articles are indexed, but also where they are displayed in the result list. As with all ranked search results, articles displayed in top positions are more likely to be read.
In recent studies we researched the ranking algorithm of Google Scholar [1-3] and gave advice to researchers on how to optimize their scholarly literature for Google Scholar [4]. However, there are provisos in the academic community against what we called “Academic Search Engine Optimization” [4]. There is the concern that some researchers might use the knowledge about ranking algorithms to ‘over optimize’ their papers in order to push their articles’ rankings in non-legitimate ways.
We conducted some experiments to find out how robust Google Scholar is against spamming. The experiments are not all completed yet but those that are completed show interesting results which are presented in this paper. Read the rest of this entry »
In June the ACM Hypertext 2010 will take place in Toronto. Some days ago I wanted to upload the camera ready versions of three papers being accepted at the conference. And… I was surprised. By email I got a link to a web page (namely
http://www.sheridanprinting.com/acm/sigweb-ht/sigweb-ht.cfm?id=ht104,
http://www.sheridanprinting.com/acm/sigweb-ht/sigweb-ht.cfm?id=ht105, and
http://www.sheridanprinting.com/acm/sigweb-ht/sigweb-ht.cfm?id=ht121)
on which I could upload my camera ready papers, specify the authors, keywords, etc. No password or other kind of authorization had to be entered. Now, guess what. I played around with the URL and tried, for instance, to open the following URLs in my browser.
http://www.sheridanprinting.com/acm/sigweb-ht/sigweb-ht.cfm?id=ht100
http://www.sheridanprinting.com/acm/sigweb-ht/sigweb-ht.cfm?id=ht107
You can probably guess what happened: I could edit the details (and see the private email addresses the primary authors provided) and upload PDF files for the other papers being accepted at Hypertext just by changing the URL. That means, I could have added or modified the author list, changed the title or uploaded a modied PDF.
The screenshot shows the user interface on which I could have changed the data for the paper “Dealing with the Video Tidal Wave: The Relevance of Expertise for Video Tagging” by Sara Darvish and Alvin Chin (here is a list of all papers being accepted at Hypertext 2010)
But it comes even better. After submitting my camera ready papers I was provided Read the rest of this entry »
In January we published our article about Academic Search Engine Optimization (ASEO). As expected, feedback varied strongly. Here are some of the opinions on ASEO:
Search engine optimization (SEO) has a golden age in this internet era, but to use it in academic research, it sounds quite strange for me. After reading this publication (pdf) focusing on this issue, my opinion changed.
[...] on first impressions it sounds like the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.
ASEO sounds good to me. I think it’s a good idea.
Good Article..
As you have probably guessed from the above criticisms, I thought that the article was a piece of crap.
In my opinion, being interested in how (academic) search engines function and how scientific papers are indexed and, of course, responding to these… well… circumstances of the scientific citing business is just natural.
Check out the following Blogs to read more about it (some in German and Dutch) Read the rest of this entry »
Today we released Beta 6 of SciPore MindMapping. There are two major improvements:
1. BibTeX files created with Mendeley can now be used with SciPlore MindMapping
2. A PDF’s title is extracted from BibTeX files and displayed in the mindmap
Download the software here http://www.sciplore.org/software/sciplore_mindmapping/
How to write a PhD thesis? This is not a trivial task. Related literature needs to be found, notes need to be taken and finally the thesis has to be drafted and written including the creation of the bibliography. Dozens of books exist about how to do a literature survey and how to write a PhD and scholarly literature in general (e.g. [1-9]). However, software tools that might help in doing a literature survey or writing a thesis are hardly covered by these books, if at all. This is surprising as many software tools exist facilitating the daily work of a PhD student.
In this tutorial we present a new method to reviewing scholarly literature and drafting a PhD thesis with mind mapping software, PDF readers and reference managers. This tutorial focuses on PhD students. However, Bachelor and Master students can use the here presented methods as well to plan and write their thesis. What makes this tutorial special is the fact that everything – PDF files, the content of PDFs (bookmarks) and references are integrated with mind mapping and word processing software.
To make the tutorial better understandable we provide many examples for which we assume that you want to write a PhD thesis about academic search engines.
Please note that
You will spend the next couple of years doing your PhD (or months if you are doing a Master or Bachelor). We highly recommend to read this and other tutorials to find out the way that is best for you to manage your literature and references and write your PhD. Spending a few hours now will save you days if not even weeks later. This tutorial will be updated from time to time to consider the latest features of the tools presented here. Last update of this tutorial: Mai 2010
Before starting, we present some user feedback that we got by email for our software and this tutorial. We hope it motivates you to read the complete tutorial .
You have read my mind. You have put into practice what I could envisage yet not even come close to develop.
You are helping to tackle the biggest obstacle to my research
I really like SciPlore’s approach. Connecting papers through a mindmap is genious!
I’m in the middle of my PhD and was becoming overwhelmed with the amount of information I need to manage. Nothing else was really cutting it for me and I stumbled on Sciplore.
Great software! Trying to get my adviser and all the graduate students in our lab to start using SciPlore. Keep up the efforts!
I very much enjoyed using Sciplore and was very impressed by its performance and options.
Congratulations on a great time saver and program to make PDF Bookmarks useful.
I’d like to thank you for the great work you’re doing.
I love your product
Great software, thanks!
Your tool is great
Thank you very much for the excellent software. SciPlore has helped me organise my notes and research while undertaking my Masters degree.
I was greatly surprised to find SciPlore, and it seemed to be exactly what I needed for my work
Just wanted to say that SciPlore is a wonderful program. I use it to organize my thoughts and my research. Can’t wait to see what’s coming!
Thanks for making SciPlore!
This tutorial is divided into three parts. the first part covers how to manage literature. The second part covers how to draft a PhD thesis. The final part covers how to write a PhD thesis and how to manage references.
But now, let’s start…
To write a good PhD thesis it is key to keep track of related work in your field. That includes that you know all the relevant studies, results, facts, ideas and so on in your field. Keep in mind, by the end of your literature review you will have read or at least skipped through hundreds of books and papers. You must be a genius to remember every interesting fact and idea you have read in a paper without any tools. Before the computer-age, academics could only rely on index cards, (post it) notes, highlighting pens, indices, etc. With computers, and especially mind mapping software, new possibilities evolved.
In this part of the tutorial we explain how to search for literature with academic search engines. Then we show how you create summaries of your PDFs with bookmarks and keep on overview of all important information in our mind map. By the end, your mind map will contain literally all information that you have considered to be important. Whenever you want to know something, you can look it up in your mind map, and read in more detail about it by clicking on the link to the PDF.
We created a video (YouTube) which explains how our mind mapping software SciPlore MindMapping can be used to manage your literature, PDFs and references. Have a look at it, we really think that this will change the way you work!
The Journal of Scholarly Publishing just published our article Academic Search Engine Optimization (ASEO): Optimizing Scholarly Literature for Google Scholar and Co. The article introduces and discusses the concept of what we call “academic search engine optimization” (ASEO) and define as: “Academic search engine optimization is the creation, publication, and modification of scholarly literature in a way that makes it easier for academic search engines to both crawl it and index it”.
Based on three recently conducted studies, guidelines are provided on how to optimize scholarly literature for academic search engines in general and for Google Scholar in particular. In addition, we briefly discuss the risk of researchers’ illegitimately ‘over-optimizing’ their articles.
Probably not everyone will agree with the article. We ourselves are not 100% sure up to what point ASEO is good and when it becomes harmful. We hope to stimulate a discussion about ASEO and are looking forward for your feedback .
The pre-print is available for free download.
