Warning : This is a thinking out-loud post , where I try to elucidate my understanding of statistics and ways of showing evidence for causation.

I was recently asked to do a class on literature review and as per usual, I decided to cover the concept of citation chaining. While the concept of citation chaining is natural, I also like to talk about how to find good sources to start with , and naturally, literature reviews, review papers, bibliographies, dissertations, systematic reviews, meta-analysis come to mind.

In 2015, Marshall Breeding the guru of Library technology and discovery summarized the state of  Library Discovery in a NISO White paper entitled "The Future of Library Discovery"

In a 2012, blog post titled - Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings, Google announced that they would be augmenting Google results not just with links but also results from the Google Knowledge Graph.

Earlier this year, I blogged about how new citation indexes were impacting Science mapping tools such as Citespace, VOSviewer , Citation Gecko and more. In this blog post, I will briefly talk about two more new mapping/visualization tools that caught my eye. The first of them is Open Knowledge maps which has been around for a while, but has a beta that now supports concept graphs in partnership with Know-Center.

When you have been in the library industry for a while, you start noticing patterns. For example, many new developments and announcements (e.g. mergers, launch of new products and services) that are intended to have a big splash are often announced at big events like ALA annual in June. To a much smaller extent we are starting to see this as well during Open Access Week.

I've always been a big fan of Summon's Best bet feature and Primo's resource recommender. If you are unfamiliar with the idea, it allows the librarian to augment search results users get with additional custom messages or recommendations when they search in Summon or Primo.

Academic related browser extensions : Browser extensions (Scite/Scholarcy)and improvements to Zotero This is an updated version of this medium post with additional mention of Zotero DOI Manager Exciting things are afoot in the world of academia and research workflow. There has been a resurgence in browser extensions in the past few years, which looks to me like the custom toolbar invasion all over again of the mid 2000s.

For a long time, there were just two main citation sources that had data that could claim to be relatively comprehensive multi-discipline wise, namely Web of Science and Scopus. (We will come to Google Scholar later). As I noted in past posts (here, here), this has changed in the last 2 years, new citation sources both  proprietary such as Dimensions, and open such as OpenCitations Corpus have started to emerge.

Where I speculate about how the concepts of skill caps and performance caps and the views that librarians implictly hold on them in these two dimensions, affect how they engage with them. I recently started playing Hearthstones a digital collectable card game and like most games in this genre, certain combinations of cards are quickly identified as “metagame defining” and dominate the game.

In this week's blog entry, I cover three new stories of interest that have one common thread - issues affecting the measurement of journal usage. The three stories are 1. A loophole in COUNTER? Are some publisher platforms double counting downloads? 2. More granular analysis of ezproxy logs?