Last week we released a project update to our reference and citation technology, CiteReader.  CiteReader allows readers to view the references within a paper submitted to SSRN and the citations from other papers in the SSRN eLibrary, making it possible for users to easily go backwards and forward in the literature.

Here is SSRN Chairman, Michael Jensen’s message about the CiteReader Project:

SSRN’s CITEREADER™ REFERENCE AND CITATION PROJECT

We have been working on extracting references from all SSRN papers for 5 years as part of the CiteReader™ project that SSRN has undertaken with our development firm, ITX Corp. We have created a system to extract references and footnotes from PDF files on SSRN and to have that extracted data proofread by human beings. While this project is not yet complete, we are now announcing the release of over 6.7 million references extracted from the reference sections of over 182,000 papers on the SSRN site as well as over 4.2 million citations that we have linked to SSRN papers.

• The references from each SSRN paper (where we have been able to extract them) can be found on the REFERENCES tab on the public abstract page for each paper.
• The citations we have matched to each SSRN paper are available on the CITATIONS tab on the public abstract page for the paper.
• These reference links provide an excellent way for any reader to go back in the literature in any area, and the citation links provide an excellent way to go forward in the literature.

Data on the Current State of SSRN’s CiteReader™ Project

• Papers with Resolved References: 182,645 out of the 270,109 full text papers on SSRN
• Total References Resolved: 6,689,847
• SSRN Papers with Resolved Citations: 180,339
• Total Citation Links between the Cited and the Citing Paper: 4,277,354
• Papers with Resolved Footnotes: 60,721 (we are giving footnote extraction priority to papers with no reference section)
• Total Extracted Footnotes: 6,899,585

NOTE: References in those papers on SSRN that do not have a Reference section have not been fully extracted as yet. We are working on this. These papers (primarily law papers) have their references in footnotes. This means that citations from law papers are currently dramatically undercounted in SSRN citation statistics.

SSRN is now extracting footnotes from all papers while giving processing priority to those papers with no reference section. We have extracted over 6.9 million footnotes from over 60,000 papers with no Reference sections thus far. These footnotes and the references we extract from them will also be appearing in tabs on SSRN’s abstract pages. SSRN is now perfecting the algorithms for extracting references from these footnotes. The undercounting of citations from and to law papers will be resolved over the next year as our algorithms are perfected and references from papers with no reference section are extracted from footnotes and linked to the papers being cited.

Sincerely,

Michael C. Jensen
Chairman
Social Science Research Network

We’ve been talking a lot about the wealth and overabundance of information at our digital fingertips.  Last week we discussed  the increase in academic plagiarism and paper mills as a possible result of the pressures of endless information.

Then I read this article on automated reporting.  Statsheet.com has fed sports fans scores, stats, and other data for years. Now they’re going a step further and creating a narrative recap of team games via automated software. While the  team sites are still in beta, it’s clear that these “robo-journalists,” spitting out stats and highlights, could soon compete with your local, run-of-the-mill sports reporter.  When Statsheet.com founder Robbie Allen was asked about the future, he suggested the Holy Grail of data analysis: financial news.

Is there a place for fact-based, automated data reporting?  What subject areas would benefit most?

Does automated content creation mitigate or increase the overabundance of information?

Is robo-journalism the first step toward robo-ghostwriting?

Two outcomes are possible: readers tire of consuming auto-generated content and return to human generated reporting or robo-reporting becomes popular for data focused subjects areas.  I also wonder if (when?) we will see companies, in an effort to keep to reduce their costs and provide new content quickly, automating the creative portion (imagery, video, etc.) of content?

Automated reporting is a very interesting and cost-saving move that I appreciate from a business perspective.  However, I personally enjoy reading well written, thought provoking articles and somewhere along the way this method feels like something is lost.

image via

The 3 R’s, the long held foundation of teaching, are adding another letter to their crew.  Looking to increase the effective communication of knowledge, several companies are shifting to visual tools and technologies.  Amongst them, different approaches are beginning to emerge.

While SSRN has recently beta tested adding audio and video content to the eLibrary, JoVE

is making a huge splash in biological experiments.  JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, is a journal for biological   experiments and the content is entirely in video format.

Several others are making everyday content more appealing by visualizing it.  One example is Pulse – a beautiful news aggregator that creates a “visual mosaic” of your individualized content.

It seems that the days of using the Encyclopedia Britannica to write your term paper are quickly coming to an end.  YouTube has become an increasingly popular source for research – from ‘how to’s, to gathering topic specific content – and questions are being raised like, “Is YouTube The Future of Online Education?”  It goes without saying that iTunes U has changed educational content with their video Podcasts.  Purdue OWL has even added reference formatting for online videos and Podcasts.

Visual learning is as old as the first picture books. And like day-glo fashions, what’s old is certainly what’s new again.

In 2008, SSRN released CiteReader and Reference Technology into their Beta labs. CiteReader captures references from the papers in the SSRN eLibrary. These references are then verified and linked to the cited papers in the eLibrary.

Currently, CiteReader and Reference Technology are accessible to all registered SSRN Users. Registration is free at SSRN’s User HeadQuarters. We hope to take this technology out of the Beta Lab and make it available to the entire public in 2010.

Since we introduced CiteReader and Reference technology into the Beta Lab last year, we have added over a million “Cited By” links to our already existing million links. To date, CiteReader has successfully:

If we captured and verified the references from a paper in the SSRN eLibrary, the Beta Lab Public abstract page will have a “References Tab” [References (#)] where # is the total number of references we have captured and verified on this paper. Click on the tab and the list of verified references for this paper will be listed.

CiteReader References and Citations Tabs

Similarly, if the paper has been cited by other papers in the SSRN eLibrary, there will be a second tab on the public abstract page – the “Citations Tab” [Citations (#)], where # is the total number of citations to this paper from other papers in the SSRN eLibrary.  Click on this tab, and the list of verified citations to this paper will be listed.

These two links allow SSRN users to easily examine the literature an author used to write a paper using the Reference Tab and to read new content that is citing the paper by using the Citations Tab. This quicker feedback on the use of scholarly content will definitely give scholars a trail to follow in their own research, and will perhaps even change the way we rate the use of new content in real time.

One of the biggest challenges in scholarly research today is wading through the growing mountain of content. We fully acknowledge there is an overabundance of information in scholarly research today and are working hard to make searching and sifting through the content contained in our eLibrary much easier. Since we received ~50,000 submissions last year, the SSRN Community needs a better interface to find research papers. After spending time thinking about different approaches to display large quantities of articles, we created the eLibrary Viewer.

The eLibrary Viewer places search results in the left hand column of the page. Each result displays hyper-linked title and authors, and the first few lines of the abstract. In addition, we included buttons to open the full abstract page in another window; view citations, references, and footnotes where available; add the abstract to a user’s MyBriefcase; and share, email, or download the paper. These features will allow readers to quickly review and share multiple articles without having to go back and forth between the results and the content pages. The eLibrary Viewer will reduce a researcher’s time reviewing articles. We hope you like it!

To use the new functionality, sign in to SSRN HQ and click on the Beta tab on the search page. Enter your criteria, click “Search” and then leave a comment telling us what you think of it.

Last month, we beta tested abstract “commenting” functionality on all abstracts in our Cognitive Science Network (CSN). With the initial success and positive feedback, we added the functionality to all abstracts in our Entrepreneurship Research and Policy Network (ERPN). This feature expands the possibilities and conversations based on scholarly research in the SSRN eLibrary. We will add commenting to all abstract pages later this year.

What’s next? – SSRN status updates or Super Poke – we don’t know but we are having fun.

Here are the top 5 papers downloaded from the SSRN eLibrary for the week ending May 15, 2009:

1. A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation
by Mebane T. Faber (Cambria Investment Management)

2. Buying Troubled Assets
by Lucian A. Bebchuk (Harvard University – Harvard Law School; National Bureau of Economic Research; European Corporate Governance Institute)

3. Up in Arms About a Revolting Movement
by Glenn Harlan Reynolds (University of Tennessee College of Law)

4. House Prices, Home Equity-Based Borrowing, and the U.S. Household Leverage Crisis
by Atif R. Mian (University of Chicago – Booth School of Business; National Bureau of Economic Research) and Amir Sufi (University of Chicago – Booth School of Business; National Bureau of Economic Research)

5. Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Cost and Ownership Structure
by Michael C. Jensen (Harvard Business School; The Monitor Company; Social Science Electronic Publishing) and William H. Meckling (University of Rochester Simon School [deceased])

Today’s post was originally going to be a quick one describing what we are doing with “social networking” and how to follow us.  It still includes instructions below, but I was reviewing my notes from Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody for my AACSB presentation last week and realized a couple of fairly obvious points.

First, as scholarly research has moved from a model of scarcity to one of information overabundance, content is no longer king.  The conversation that surrounds the content is king, along with the innovation that occurs because of the easier access. My simple definition of innovation is the ability to create new things by being exposed to a broader and deeper set of existing things.  Easier access to research and the conversation facilitates innovation.

Second, access needs to be based on each user’s perspective and personal style.  Just as we digest food in different ways (sitting at a quiet table for two, standing at the sink, etc.) at different times, we digest information in different ways at different times.  The key is to provide access in variety of ways that work for different people at different times.

Thus, we are expanding how you can get content from the SSRN eLibrary and will continue to expand as new and different means are created.  As Chris Anderson wrote, “Long tail businesses treat consumers as individuals, offering mass customization as an alternative to mass market fare.”  We aren’t there yet, but we are trying.

OK, back to the originally scheduled post …

With the growth of the Internet, social networking has expanded to allow a person to connect with another person in real time regardless of geography or to access information no matter where it is stored.  We see a plethora of opportunities for the SSRN Community using these tools.  As a first step, we have joined Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn and will post updates, announcements, and other items to them regularly.

Here is how to find us:

Twitter:
http://twitter.com/SSRN

Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rochester-NY/SSRN/36086731835

LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=40866

Welcome to the SSRN Blog, the official blog of the Social Science Research Network.

Since its start in 1994, SSRN has grown significantly — we currently have 18 focused research networks, more than 200,000 papers in the eLibrary, and surpassed 25 million total downloads in December (the number is now more than 27 million). As we reached and surpassed several milestones, we realized that not everyone knows our history or has access to news about the latest updates or changes to the website. The SSRN Blog comes as a natural outcome of our desire to share information and keep the SSRN Community up to date. Hopefully, it will also enhance our already wonderful connections with our users.

The SSRN Blog will not be a broadcast vehicle. We want to engage you in an ongoing conversation. Readers will get updates regarding SSRN’s eLibrary and services, weekly “Top Ten” lists, and announcements of new networks, conferences, and presentations. Our posts will explore and share our perspective on issues such as Open Access, new publishing models and directions for scholarly research, and the technologies that affect us all. We will also be linking several articles and other blog posts in the “Media Mentions” section on the right side of the page.

We are very excited about launching the SSRN Blog, and I personally invite you to join us as we grow and expand the SSRN Community.

Thanks,
Gregg