The Web of Science database platform was redesigned. The user interface has been redesigned and new features have been added. The old “classic” Web of Science interface will be available until the end of 2021. In this context, the Journal Citation Reports were also renewed.
The new features include:
The Web of Science Author Impact Beamplots – A new visualization tool that showcases the range of a researcher’s publication and citation impact in a single data exhibit.
Enriched Cited References (Beta) – Selected journals now feature a new visualization tool which helps researchers navigate cited references by time, proximity, location and number of citations.
Funding data – Every publication linked to a funded project now features additional information such as Award Date, Total Award Amount, Primary Investigator and more.
Share a search query – It is now possible to copy a search query in the Web of Science, making it easier to share searches directly with other researchers and supporting collaboration.
Advanced search workflow – Now includes a query builder that re-uses the search history to make precision searching easier and faster for all users.
Export Citation Report – Streamlined data export workflow so users may export up to 1000 records at one time, saving them time and simplifying complex data pulling.
Export into RIS reference format – Users can now export into the RIS reference format from the Web of Science Core Collection, into EndNote™ and many other bibliographic management tools.
Article recommendations – A new feature to encourage coincidental discovery, helping researchers uncover papers that they might not have found with their search strategy.
Web of Science™ My Research Assistant – A new mobile app that brings the power of the Web of Science to mobile phones or devicec, so one is equipped wherever inspiration strikes.
Getting Help with the new resource center – By clicking the question mark icon users find several base to get help and connect with experts.
The new Web of Science is also designed to support a range of future developments, including personalized home pages, author alerts and article-level metrics.
Video about the new interface and features of Web of Science
The 2021 Journal Citation Reports (JCR) with the Journal Impact Factors (JIFs) by Clarivate are now available. This year’s edition includes:
more journals – content has been expanded to more than 20,000 journals from 113 countries and 254 research categories in the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities.
enhanced user experience – interactive visualizations, simpler navigation and contextual help make the JCR more intuitive to use.
Since Clarivate’s Journal Impact Factors (JIFs) are widely used (and often misused!), we want to highlight three common misconceptions about them in this blog post.
Misconception #1: The journal impact factor is a tool for scientists to evaluate the quality of the papers in a specific journal.
When the idea of the journal impact factor was originally conceived its primary goal was to give librarians a method to compare and select journals for acquisition into their holdings (Garfield, 1955). It was never designed as a tool to evaluate papers or individuals – especially not when it comes to making decisions regarding the allocation of research grants, hiring faculty members, or similar.
Misconception #2: The journal impact factor considers all publications and their citations for a specific journal.
Often it takes several years for a research topic to gain momentum and attract wider attention. The JIF however only considers the number of citations in a certain year and the “citable items” in that journal, which were published in the two preceding years:
While all the citations a journal receives in the given year count towards the JIF, not all publications of the two preceding years are considered citable items – only articles, reviews or proceedings. This can lead to an artificial inflation of JIFs – observed especially for journals like Nature and Science, which publish many widely cited editorials and news articles (Bornmann & Marx, 2016).
Misconception #3: The journal impact factor is a precise value.
In order to be able to sort journals by rank in the JCR, JIFs are given with three decimals and no confidence intervals or error bars. This data precision, however, is an illusion. The measurement of citation count is not an exact science as illustrated in bibliometrics on multiple occasions, e.g. Vanclay, 2012.
In conclusion, we advise you to consult several metrics and indicators in addition to the JIF to create a more complete evaluation of a journal. Examples for alternative journal metrics are:
The Cited Half Life, which is the median age of the articles that were cited in the JCR year (included in Clarivate’s JCR)
Scientists at the University of Zurich are able to publish Open Access articles free of charge published in journals within the Read&Publish agreement by Taylor&Francis. This agreement covers the article processing charges (APCs) for a fixed number of articles published in Taylor&Francis journals per year. This number has now been reached for 2021. Until the end of 2021 the article fee will no longer be funded. Members of the University of Zurich or its affiliated hospitals may continue to publish OA articles, but at their own expense. If the article is published in a Gold Open Access journal in the field of the humanities or social sciences there is the possibility of a partial cost coverage within the Publishing Fund for Social Sciences and Humanities of the Main Library or within the Open Access Publication Fund (Bretscher-Fund) of the Zentralbibliothek Zurich, which supports publications on social and intellectual history of the 20th century.
It is also possible to choose the green Open Access route (self-archiving) for publishing Open Access. The accepted manuscript can be published in a repository (e.g. ZORA) after an embargo period.
Starting today, the Main Library and the Central IT are offering researchers, faculties and institutes/clinics as well as libraries a new service: the Open Access Monitor. At https://www.oamonitor.uzh.ch, various thematically structured interactive dashboards allow complex evaluations related to Open Access. It is possible to customize the dashboards using various filters. For example, they can be filtered by publication year, institute, author name, but also by ISSN or journal title. The possibilities – even for complex queries – are wide-ranging with filter or search slot settings.
The Zurich Open Repository and Archive, ZORA, serves as the data basis. Every change in ZORA is immediately updated in the monitor. Accordingly, the monitor of the Main Library also serves to identify, supplement and clean up incomplete and inconsistent data in ZORA.
We would like to demontrate the monitor in three use cases.
Use case 1: An institute wants to display the OA share of its publication output in 2020.
To do this, first navigate to the menu item “Faculties and Institutes ” for the following dashboard.
The desired publication year and community can be filtered in the dashboard. Subsequently, all visualizations and key figures will be directly adjusted. Here, as an example, you can see the publications of 2020 of the Department of Informatics:
If you now want to determine which publications are not yet Open Access, you can find out with two clicks. To do this, first click on the blue bar in the visualization at the bottom right (“donut”) that stands for “Closed”.
Now a menu appears with various options, including “Go to ZORA items”. Clicking on it opens a table with all ZORA entries that meet the filter criteria. You can easily export the table as a CSV file.
Various visualizations offer the possibility to obtain further information by clicking on the bars or to go directly to other visualizations. If you move the mouse over a visualization, three horizontal dots appear in the upper right corner on a grey background. Clicking on the dots in turn opens a menu that contains, among other things, the option “Inspect”.
Using “Inspect”, the number and distribution of the underlying documents is obtained and may also be exported via a CSV file.
Use case 2: A researcher would like to find out in which publishers and journals at UZH Gold Open Access publications are most frequent.
For this use case, the dashboard in the menu item “Publishers and Journals” is most suitable.
There are three different ways to get the result.
– In the search slot you can enter the following search query: agg_oastatus : “gold”.
– With “+ Add filter” you can enter “OA” for Field, “is” for Operator and “gold” for Value and then click on “Save”.
– Click on the golden bar in the donut diagram at the bottom left to open a selection menu. There you can select the option “Apply filter to current view”.
All three options lead to the same result:
By clicking on the tiles, further information is available, e.g. which researchers have published most frequently with the selected publisher or journal. To do this, select “Show top 100 researchers”.
Use case 3: A researcher wants to know what their OA share is
In the section “Authors”, you can search by name or ORCID iD. For technical reasons, please enter the name strictly according to the scheme “Last name First name”, also upper and lower case must be considered. Often several name variants appear, which all have to be selected one by one. The reason for this is that different name variants often appear in publications, e.g. “Doe J” and “Doe Jane”. We also recommend inserting the ORCID iD to ZORA so that the results are unique.
The results can be analysed in more detail according to the descriptions in use cases 1 and 2 by clicking on the individual diagrams. For example, authors can find out which of their publications are not yet open access, etc.
Further information
Technically, the monitor relies on the Elasticsearch search engine. The visualization of the data indexed in Elasticsearch is performed with the browser-based open source analysis platform Kibana, which is built on Elasticsearch.
The Main Library of the University of Zurich and the Zentralbibliothek Zurich are ending the membership of the Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek (EZB) as of July 5, 2021. The active management of the Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek has already been discontinued as of the end of 2020 (see blog post). The journals of the University of Zurich and the Zentralbibliothek Zurich can be found in the Recheportal. Also, BrowZine can be used to search for e-journals.
In summer 2020, the library of the Department of Anthropology (AIM) was integrated into the Main Library – Science (Y15). A large part of the library’s collection is now accessible in the open access area on floor J. The collection covers a wide range of topics in anthropology, including a number of older publications from the library of the former head of the Department of Anthropology, Adolph Schultz. A selection of books from the collection as well as some reproductions from Adolph Schultz’s handwritten notebooks are shown in the new exhibition on floor J in the Main Library – Science.
Blog entries with further information about the exhibition will appear regularly.
As a follow-up to the UZH Open Science Summer School 2020, a half-day workshop on “The Legal Aspects of Open Science” was held earlier this year. The workshop was organized by the HBZ in cooperation with the Graduate Campus and met with such great interest that it even had to be held three times. It seems that copyright, licenses and Co. are on the minds of the research community at the UZH. So, what did the participants learn in the workshop?
The workshop was led by Suzanna Marazza and Anna Picco-Schwendener from the Competence Center in Digital Law (CCdigitallaw) and gave the participants in-depth insights into the definition of copyright and protected works, the difference between moral and economic copyright, the rights of other users when they want to copy, modify or share protected works, as well as the connection between copyright and Open Science and how to choose the right license. The workshop made it apparent that a good understanding of copyright and licenses is particularly important in the context of Open Science. This is due to the fact that Open Science practices aim to make everything publicly available to everyone, while copyright law prevents this from happening automatically. However, by granting detailed licenses, an author can, for example, grant others certain rights that determine how the copyrighted works may be further processed and used. Depending on the license then, other users have different possibilities of using a work, from “everything is allowed” to “use is allowed, but only if the user indicates the author, does not modify the work and does not use it for commercial purposes”.
The presentation slides of the workshop can be downloaded here. More information about copyright can also be found on the HBZ site.
The topic of copyright is thus complicated enough in and of itself. If personal and sensitive data of research participants also comes into play, data management becomes even more complicated. The DMLawTool developed by CCdigitallaw is designed to help researchers find their way through the legal jungle: How and under what conditions can I publish my data open access, which licenses are necessary, and what do I do with personal data? All this and much more can be found out at dmlawtool.web.app.
And for those who are also interested: The HBZ and the GRC are organizing a community event on Open Science on June 18, 2021 for an exchange of experiences. You can register via contact@grc.uzh.ch .
Did you know that Switzerland’s glaciers have lost almost a third of their remaining ice mass since the year 2000? Or that the Great Aletsch Glacier stores around 20% of Swiss glacier ice? Or that the Great Aletsch Glacier stores around 20% of Swiss glacier ice?
Information on glacier extent and ice thickness can now be accessed on the federal government’s map platform, map.geo.admin.ch. Parameters such as area, volume or the maximum and average ice thickness for the individual glaciers can be called up. The data allow forecasts of expected glacier retreat, water runoff or the assessment of glacier-related natural hazards.
glacier extent in the engadin valley. source: map.geo.admin.ch
The glacier inventory of the Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland GLAMOS serves as the data basis. In addition, a helicopter-based radar system was developed in a multi-year project at ETH Zurich to measure ice thickness.
The English physician Edward Jenner is considered the inventor of smallpox vaccine. He first published his findings in 1798. Just two years later, in 1800, physician Johann Heinrich Lavater vaccinated the first child in Zurich.
A few years later, the Gesellschaft der Wundärzte auf dem Schwarzen Garten – The Zurich society of physicians’s at the time- conducted what was probabely Zurich’s first vaccination campaign. The medical doctors and surgeons of the society had founded the medizinisch-chirurgische Institut in 1782, a predecessor of the Zurich medical faculty found in 1833. Its members saw themselves as enlightened pioneers in the application of progressive scientific methods for the common good. Accordingly, they reacted enthusiastically to the new vaccine. At the beginning of the 19th century, smallpox was the most feared infectious disease. In regularly recurring epidemics, countless children fell victim to the disease. Even those who survived the disease often remained scarred or suffered other impairments.
From 1804 to 1806, the Gesellschaft der Wundärzte auf dem Schwarzen Garten promoted smallpox vaccination in three editions of its New Year’s bulletin dedicated to Zurich’s youth. Each bulletin contained a copperplate engraving and a few pages of explanations. At a time when pictures were still scarce, the illustrations were of particular interest.
Children receive gifts for their smallpox vaccination. 14. Neujahrsstück von der Gesellschaft der Wundärzte auf dem Schwarzen Garten, an die liebe Zürcherische Jugend, auf das Neujahr 1804. Copper engraving by Franz Hegi. Hauptbibliothek – Medizin Careum.
A gift for vaccination
The first engraving in the bulletin of 1804 depicts of an elegantly dressed family from the urban bourgeoisie with their servants. The mother, in a fashionable Empire dress based on the French model, tenderly puts her arms around a boy and a girl who have just received a hobbyhorse and a doll as a gift for their vaccination. Another, smaller child is still in the arms of a nurse. The text explains that the family is following the custom of relatives sending a «gift of smallpox» to children who had survived the infection. The two children of this family instead receive «gifts of cowpox, or vaccination».
The text praises « the wise house-father and the unprejudiced house-mother» who «with the reassuring conviction of having chosen the best» decided on smallpox vaccination. «All three, the tender little one which the keeper carries, as well as the other two, have nearly survived this slight and harmless disease, and receive the ordinary present for smallpox. They are not weak and sickly, these little ones; they suffer from no ill effects of the disease; their faces are not disfigured; their eyes have suffered no damage; they can immediately take pleasure in their presents.»
The characteristic appearance of the vaccination pustule in five stages on day 5 (a), day 6 (b), day 8 (c) and day 11 (d). Neujahrsstück von der Gesellschaft der Wundärzte auf dem Schwarzen Garten, an die liebe Zürcherische Jugend, auf das Neujahr 1805. Coloured copperplate engraving by Prof. Meyer. Hauptbibliothek – Medizin Careum.
A true vaccination pustule
The engraving of 1805 depicts the ideal-typical development of the vaccination pustules. This illustration was intended to familiarise Zurich doctors with the «true vaccination pustule”. The pictures and the description of the course of the disease were an important part of the instructions for the new method, because only by closely observing the development of the pustules could the doctors be sure that it was really cowpox.
Vaccination from arm to arm was recommended. For this purpose, a little fluid was taken from the fully formed pustule of a previously vaccinated child with a needle or lancet. A child placed on the opposite received some incisions with a lancet or needle in the upper arm, so that the skin could be opened like a flap. The fresh lymph of the first child was applied on these openings. If it was not possible to vaccinate from arm to arm, the lymph was dried on small glass plates that could be pressed onto the incisions of another child later. Other methods included soaking a cotton thread with lymph or using the dried scab of a vaccination pustule.
Characteristic appearance
After three days, a small, reddish, hard nodule developed on at least part of the vaccinated area, which gradually grew into a blister. The vaccination was considered successful if at least one pustule showed the characteristic appearance after eight days, as shown in the copperplate engraving in the middle of the picture. Now, if necessary, lymph could be taken for further vaccinations. The pustule then gradually receded until it was almost completely covered by scabs. The regular course of the vaccination process also included one or two days of fever and general malaise.
According to the bulletin, vaccination was already very popular in the city of Zurich in 1805, so that during an epidemic that year «only 6 non-vaccinated children got the human pox» in the city of Zurich. In the countryside, however, vaccination was still rather unknown. In the neighbouring village of Schwamendingen, many children died again, about seven for every ten who fell ill.
Portrait Edward Jenner. 16. Neujahrsstück von der Gesellschaft der Wundärzte auf dem Schwarzen Garten, an die liebe Zürcherische Jugend, auf das Neujahr 1806. Copper engraving by Johann Heinrich Lips. Hauptbibliothek – Medizin Careum.
A medical hero
The last bulletin in the series was dedicated to Edward Jenner. Johann Heinrich Lavater had an engraving specially commissioned from England for the portrait. The Zurich artist and engraver Johann Heinrich Lips copied it and engraved it in copper. In the text, Jenner is recommended as a role model for young readers of all classes, because «his behaviour in discovering and publicising the cowpox vaccine is a model not only for doctors and natural scientists, but for everyone who has the opportunity to notice and assess natural occurrences and to derive interesting consequences from them: and such opportunities present themselves to every person, whatever his class and profession, more often in the course of his life. »
Indeed, Jenner made his discovery not as a medical authority but as a simple country doctor. His merit was that he followed indications that milkmaids who had contracted cowpox melking infected cows with open wounds on their hands had become immune to smallpox. His experiments with children – including his own son – showed that deliberate infection with cowpox reliably protected against smallpox and was associated with significantly fewer dangers than the already known method of inoculation, the deliberate transmission of real smallpox. With its publication by the Royal Society, vaccination (after Latin variolae vaccinae= cowpox) spread rapidly throughout Europe. Jenner as the «saviour of thousands of lives» became one of the first popular medical heroes. In the course of the 19th century, numerous children’s hospitals and other medical institutions for children were named after him.
