Do you want to know what other users that have your same interests are reading? The Social Science Research Network’s database has a “recommendation functionality” (a.k.a “People who downloaded this paper also downloaded…”) that will tell you just this.  Our recommendation function gives a user a list of papers that have been downloaded by other users. This list will appear on a public abstract page to the right of the abstract. The list contains up to 10 recommended papers that have been downloaded by other users that have also downloaded the paper on that public abstract page. This function may list more content that is relevant to our users than what is listed in just a regular search.

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.

CSN commenting Box

As part of “narrowing the distance” between authors and readers, we are beta testing “commenting” on all public abstract pages in our Cognitive Science Network.  As I said in a previous post, “…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…” The commenting functionality launched this week allows our readers to leave comments for the author and other readers on the abstract’s web page.  We hope this functionality provides a simple forum for hundreds of conversations based on scholarly research in the SSRN eLibrary.  Commenting will be available on all public abstract pages later this year.

When I look at the SSRN Community, I am excited and motivated by the challenges and possibilities in front of us.  We need to be innovative and responsive to the changing needs of our community, but have to deal with the harsh realities of a terrible economy and limited development resources. However, I hope we use these challenges to become more innovative. My simple definition of innovation is the creation of new things by being exposed to a broader and deeper set of existing things.  Innovation is critical to SSRN’s future.  In fact, we need to be innovative about being innovative.

Tom Koulopoulos’ new book, The Innovation Zone discusses re-innovating innovation and provides “Seven Lessons of Innovation.”  Koulopoulos states the basic tenet that we all need to understand, “Invention is NOT innovation.  Innovation creates value.  Invention just creates more stuff.”  Innovating often sounds hard or based on luck, but Koulopoulos says it is achievable with some basic building blocks.

One of the challenges we currently face is providing personalization to our users. We would like to develop SSRN so that each user can obtain the content they want in a way they want. However, personalization is difficult with the broad spectrum of users we serve – from non-academics and undergraduates to some of the smartest scholars in the world, including several Nobel Laureates.  Add to this the diverse technological capabilities of our users, and the challenge of personalization becomes even greater. However, Koulopoulos views personalization as an opportunity for innovation (and I think a great opportunity for SSRN):

“Personalization is where innovation takes on a new dimension that simply has no parallel in today’s market. We may talk about ‘markets of one’ but we’ve hardly delivered on the vision. When we do, innovation will finally be driven by the market.” (Excerpt: ‘The Innovation Zone’)

We discuss innovation a lot at SSRN and I believe that we are a pretty innovative company.  Unfortunately, we will need to be extremely innovative to be successful.  Several copies of The Innovation Zone just arrived from Amazon for our development team.  I think it will help refine our process and make SSRN better for everyone.