Seminar Abstract

Friday, March 30, 2007 • 12:15 AM • Medium Conference Room

Johan Bollen and Marko A. Rodriguez Los Alamos National Laboratory

MESUR: Modeling and Analysis of the Scholarly Community

Metrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources (MESUR) is a 2-year, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project at the Digital Library Research and Prototyping team of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library. The MESUR project aims to define and validate a range of usage-based metrics of scholarly impact to improve the assessment of scholarly status which is now largely based on citation counts. The project will create a large-scale semantic network representation of the scholarly community that includes those scholarly artifacts for which large-scale real world data exists, i.e. citation, bibliographic and usage data. The semantic network will represent approximately 50 million articles and their associated objects (e.g. authors, journals, publishers, institutions) and 1 billion usage (download) events representing world-wide user activity. A range of usage-based metrics of scholarly impact will be defined and validated using the instantiated semantic network as a substrate. This talk will discuss the MESUR project\'s objective, work plan and architecture, and conclude with the presentation of a novel algorithmic framework for the analysis of semantic networks.

MESUR: http://www.mesur.org/