Dr. Andrea Scharnhorst
Interview: 10.12.2012
Profile
Andrea Scharnhorst is senior research fellow at the eHumanities group of the KNAW and head of the e-research group at the Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. She studied physics and the philosophy of science at the Humboldt University of Berlin and received a PhD on her thesis Philosophical, Methodological and Gnoseological Problems of the Application of Methods of the Physics of Self-Organisation to Quantitative Aspects of the Development of Science. Since 2001 she has been employed with the KNAW, first as senior researcher at the former NIWI institute, afterwards with the Virtual Knowledge Studio and currently with DANS. Her fields of interest include knowledge landscapes, science dynamics and development, and scientometrics.
View on enhanced publications
Andrea does all her scientific communication, both reading and writing, in a digital environment. She reads PDFs from screen and once in a while will print some text, but she has a soft spot for books because of the care and sustainability of printed material. The production of digital content is relatively easy and, therefore, quality control is often not as good as it should be.
However, a strong point of digital publications are the ease of access to linked material, both bibliographic references and data. With regard to enhanced publications she would like to see that the basic bibliographic references could be easily collected and are connected. There is a great potential in this respect. It would be great if one can flawlessly jump from an article through the included references to related publications, just as in big bibliographic databases (as the Web of Knowledge of Thompson Reuter or SCOPUS of Elsevier) that are supposed to facilitate the discovering of literature.
With regard to enhanced publications it is of primary importance to have an overview. This overview should not be overloaded with information, but provide a concise summary of related resources using semantic web techniques, just like the InContext visualizer, and should cover references in particular. A second target is access to underlying data, followed by visualization. Visualization may be helpful in cleaning up the mess in metadata descriptions, because it shows the odd things which are not supposed to be there.
Download measures indicating highly popular articles may be of some help during orientation in a scientific fields, but these figures are not to be used for general evaluation of the scientific work. What is quality has to be determined by the scientific community in which the work is carried out. Social network activity concerning research (like blogs and websites such as Mendeley) is interesting, but tends to grow to enormous proportions, which makes it difficult to make any well-founded choice from the whole and forces to local selection. Here again, an overview based on generic topics and not delving too deeply into specialties will be of great help.
Andrea is interested in the way the features of enhanced publications are distributed over different scientific domains and in the life span and the own dynamics of certain features (when did they appear first, which ones come and go, and which ones do stay).
Top four
Her priorities regarding enhancement of publications:
1. Making the information sources semantically referenceable, which applies primarily to the basic elements, such as names of authors, titles of articles and books.
2. Downloading raw data.
3. Interactive images, which serve as direct illustrations (in particular useful for students who want to understand a domain).
4. Interactive design, which allows the reader to select information. The author should determine which features are to be included in order let the reader concentrate on his argument.