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| The
Open Citation Project - Reference Linking for Open Archives |
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Evaluation
| V1.0 demo evaluation
Produced August 2000
V 1.0 demo: evaluation by arXiv authors: summary
Should the project’s demonstrator of citation linking for the physics archives
be adopted as a real service, then users of that service would be the intended
beneficiaries. This questionnaire-based evaluation, managed via email,
was intended to get preliminary feedback from those users. It was not meant
to be a detailed evaluation, which would not be appropriate for the first
(v 1.0) demonstrator. Instead, it was designed to obtain simple responses
that would confirm (or not) the validity of the approach and to prompt
comments that would guide the implementation of subsequent versions.
Circulation of the questionnaire was restricted to less than 100 users,
at the request of our colleagues at Los Alamos. In an attempt to maximise
the response rate, authors of the papers in the demonstrator with most
links were selected to receive the questionnaire.
The response suggests a well established community of users with well
focussed needs.
Main findings
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The demonstrated approach to linking is endorsed with some qualifications.
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All aspects of the interface need more user-focussed development.
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The use of PDF as the linking format continues to present some users with
problems, e.g. speed of download, viewer not supported, lack of familiarity
with the format.
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Two most-desired enhancements to the demonstrator are to:
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make it an integral part of arXiv
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links to online journals.
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Two results indicate that arXiv papers are the most appropriate place for
reference links:
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These users overwhelmingly use arXiv for accessing full texts of papers
and as their principal resource discovery tool.
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Citations are used (predictably) to discover new works to greater or lesser
degree (not clarified in these results).
arXiv authors results in detail.
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