Case Studies

Thomson Scientific Expands their Research Community through Mashups

Company Profile

The Thomson Corporation is a leading global provider of integrated information-based solutions to business and professional customers. Over 80% of Thomson’s $7.3 billion in 2007 revenue was derived from electronic products, software and services. The Thomson Corporation is organized into five segments: Legal, Financial, Tax & Accounting, Scientific, and Healthcare. Thomson Scientific information based solutions keep academic, government, corporate, and pharma R&D professionals at the forefront of their markets by providing must-have authoritative content with innovative technologies that assist with discovery, analysis, product development and distribution.

The Challenge

For researchers, past and future successes are defined by the works they have published and the influence of that research on fellow researchers. Collaboration becomes an essential functionality to creating community recognition through published works. Thomson Scientific’s ‘Researcher ID’ a global multi-disciplinary scholarly research community was designed to invite researchers to build their publication list and search the registry to find potential collaborators. However the Web 1.0 design of the community made it difficult for researchers to easily search, tag, cite and collaborate with other researchers. Community expectations faltered, growth and adoption were minimal and researchers struggled to benefit from the anticipated community value.

The Solution

The Thomson team now tasked with creating a more collaborative environment chose to expand their research community with the assistance of enterprise mashup solution provider JackBe. The ResearcherID Labs includes many innovative community and collaboration tools built upon mashups and mashlets. By adding new community building components with mashups, researchers are now able to expand their professional networks through the ResearcherID Badge, a LinkedIn-style mashlet interface for a researcher’s ResearcherID profile. The mashlet allows researchers to publicize his/her publications, current collaborators and current citations, as well as encourage new citations and collaborators. Researchers can easily embed their Badge in a web page or blog without any programming skills. The contents of the Badge are based dynamically upon the researcher’s ResearcherID dataset and personalized ResearcherID security settings.

Researchers are also able to access ‘The Collaboration Network’ a tool for researchers to review collaborators by name, category, geography, or institution. While simultaneously tracking research citations through ‘The Citing Articles Network’ a tool for researchers to review citations of their publications by author, category, geography, institution or year.

Benefits

Mashups were a successful addition to the ResearcherID community. Within weeks and with little direct promotion or advertising to its community, there were soon hundreds of independent professional blogs/websites with Badges in them, all linking back to ResearcherID. The mashup-driven Badges allowed the community members to become the extended ‘sales team’ that pushed the community's reach well beyond the formal boundaries of the community portal.

Increased community adoption and membership through embeddable Web 2.0 style Badges
Improved knowledge sharing throughout the research community, creating more detailed bodies of work for information sharing
Enhanced network collaboration, influencing research from cultures around the world