CISTI Sciverse Gadget App

Betwixt the jigs and the reels, and with the help of several people at CISTI and Elsevier, I developed a (beta) Sciverse gadget that gives searchers and researchers a window on CISTI’s electonic collection by taking the search term entered in Elsevier Hub and providing them with CISTI’s search results from a database of over 20 million journal articles.

Next year, I plan follow up with another Sciverse gadget for my citation-based recommender that uses the full power of Elsevier’s API into its collection content.

I want to commend all and sundry at Sciverse Applications for this initiative.  Opening up bibligraphic data and providing developers with a developer platform (a customized version of Google’s OpenSocial platform) is exactly the right kind of thing to do both to benefit third parties (they get access to anotherwise closed and proprietary data) and to enhance their own search and discover environment.

There are, already, several advanced and interesting applications on Sciverse. My favourites are: Altmetric (winner of the Science Challenge prize – see YouTube demo video below) NextBio’s Prolific Authors and Elsevier’s Table Download.

And there will be more to come. An open marketplace like this where the principles of variation and natural selection can operate will, I predict, make for a richer diversity of useful search and discovery tools than any single organization can develop on its own.