17–19 Jun 2009
University of Geneva
Europe/Zurich timezone

Studying scientific activity from large-scale usage data

19 Jun 2009, 11:00
30m
University of Geneva

University of Geneva

Speaker

Dr Johan Bollen (LANL)

Summary

Science is of significant importance to our society, but we understand very little of the
processes that lead to scientific innovation. In this presentation I will provide an
overview of our work on large-scale usage data as an early indicator of scientific
activity. The MESUR project has in the past 2 years aggregated a large-scale collection
of the usage data recorded by some of the world's most significant publishers,
aggregators and institutional consortia. The resulting data set has been analyzed to
reveal the structural properties of scientific activity in real-time. I will highlight
some of our recent work on producing detailed maps of science that reveal how scientists
navigate between online scholarly resources. The results indicate that it may be possible
to detect or predict the emergence of innovation from temporal changes in the structure
of scientific activity. This work underpints efforts to arrive at a more accurate,
pro-active evaluation of scientific impact.



View Johan Bollen's profile

Presentation materials