Expert profiling: connecting the experts
Jinfo Blog

15th July 2010

By Joanna Ptolomey

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As a researcher we are often called in to ‘join the dots’ especially when it comes to finding people and experts. Building up a network of experts in a particular field, with all the obvious background details such as what they are working on, where they work and any partnerships and groups. In the past this job could be ‘mighty tedious’ especially when trying to discover experts from the academic sector. Then came an organisation called Collexis – the people behind AIP UNiPHY (http://digbig.com/5bcapa) and biomedexperts.com (http://digbig.com/5bcapb) . They developed an expert profiling platform and application that opened up a new kind of transparency in the scientific, technical and medical sector to allow researchers to connect. On the 13th July 2010 Collexis announced a new version of their ‘Expert Profiling’ - complete with a community platform. This allows researchers to connect across disciplines, but also across multiple institutions. Collexis (http://www.collexis.com/) is a developer of semantic and discovery technology and software. They recently became part of the Elsevier family (http://www.elsevier.com) of products in a buy-out concluded in June 2010 as reported in LiveWire (http://digbig.com/5bcapc). Prior to the acquisition of Collexis by Elsevier the profiles were generated using PubMed data (http://digbig.com/5bcany ). This is great content but limited in breadth of scope. Now the profiles are powered by the 18,000 peer review journals in the Scopus database. Scopus, reviewed last year in VIP (http://digbig.com/5bcanx) , has excellent content and great breadth of scope. This improves the profiles being generated not just in biomedical and life sciences but across all scientific disciplines. The community module could offer another ‘power punch’ to this product. Now research experts from other institutions can be identified. This allows capability to find similar experts, grants and publications. I do have a caveat to add to this story based on my recent LiveWire article ‘Web 2.0: just hype say researchers? (http://digbig.com/5bcapd). This type of technology is fantastic and you cannot fault the content - but there are issues. The most important content in these types of discovery products will be generated by the active participation of the authors and researchers. This is the real value added material and vendors cannot replicate or anticipate what it will be. This I believe is the barrier to the long term success of these products. But by developing a community platform this could be the key for more active participation by institutions - and consequently a better product.

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