The New Version of Infoscience (& Me) Is a Hit

More than 10 years since its inception, Infoscience adopts a highly anticipated new look. Following its first revision in 2010, the new 2.0 version of the online portal for EPFL’s institutional archives should be widely popular, particularly for its service-oriented approach. Functional and user friendly, the platform now offers EPFL’s researchers and laboratories a unique and intuitive entry point to all their publications and related statistics.

Features

Infoscience & Moi – this is the name of the portal’s personal page – makes it possible, first of all, to check all variants of one’s name recognized by Infoscience. However, its primary feature is the opportunity it provides to observe the evolution of one’s H-Index on Google scholar and Web of Science, as long as one has entered a personal ID for the relevant archive.

Concerning publications of a researcher or a laboratory, the new Infoscience personal page offers the possibility to monitor at a glance:

• The distribution of publications per year or in detail by year or by type of
documentation
• The full-texts sorted by number of downloads
• The most cited publications, according to data from Web of Science
• Newspapers with whom one has worked the most

This new version of the portal for EPFL’s institutional archives is far more important than it might seem. In addition to adding to the renown of an academic institution, the number of citations is an indication of a researcher’s scientific recognition. Deveaud Benedict, Dean of Research at EPFL, has been a supporter of Infoscience since its inception: “Researchers know that the impact of their bibliometric data is becoming increasingly important. From our side, we are trying to improve our understanding of all that is going on at EPFL. As a result, and so that everyone is satisfied, the researcher must want to put his data on Infoscience.”

Conclusive Test

This new version of Infoscience has been tested for several months by various laboratories of the School of Basic Sciences. Kevin Sivula is Assistant Professor in the Molecular Engineering Laboratory of Optoelectronic Nanomaterials. According to him, it has the potential to be a very useful tool: “Obviously some small improvements can still be made, but researchers can have quick access to their library of publications and track their progress.”

Ongoing Success

Infoscience can manage articles, conference papers, reports, and a dozen other types of scientific or educational materials. Since its inception in 2004, Infoscience has been expanded to include more than 100,000 publication references, 30,000 of which are supplemented with the full-text. This success has been stimulated by EPFL’s commitment to open access and has been verified by a usage curve with a decidely positive slope.

One question remains: how can researchers be convinced to add the full-text of their work for open access?

Deveaud Benedict’s answer: “There are many reasons to add full-texts. The first is that the goal of a researcher is to have his work known by all. The easiest way is to make it available on the internet on a visible site. This is one of the goals of Infoscience. Moreover, even apart from this visibility, some researchers do not have access to bibliographic resources. The ability to easily find full-texts helps them in their own research.”

To try the latests version of Infoscience and its new personal portal, Infoscience & Me, simply go to: infoscience.epfl.ch