Serials librarians may be interested in Citebase, a search service that
applies techniques with which they will be very familiar for discovering
papers on the Web. In this case, citation-ranked search can be used to find
papers that are available from open sources such as OAI repositories. The
largest repository covered by Citebase is arXiv, the Physics Archive.

Citation-ranking was, of course, pioneered by Eugene Garfield and is used
in a number of products by ISI. Coverage by ISI is limited by design to
about 6500 selected journals. In contrast, Citebase performs similar
analysis to selected Web archives where open access and formats allow
reference lists to be extracted and processed automatically and which have
a critical mass of papers in a field to make citation analysis effective.

Citebase ties citation analysis to access: every *citing* paper is directly
accessible to users. Does it work? Librarians have experience of such
services and can help us evaluate the merits and drawbacks of the Citebase
approach in comparison with established citation-based services that have
different scope and model.

There are other aspects to evaluate, such as whether Citebase is useful for
and usable by users. So you might like to invite members of your
institution to try Citebase too. For all users, there is a form to guide
evaluation (via redirect) at http://citebase.eprints.org/survey/

Citebase has been developed by the Open Citation project, part of the Joint
NSF - JISC International Digital Libraries Research Programme. The project
is nearing its conclusion, so this evaluation will help shape the
transition from project to full service.

Thank you for contributing, and for your help in bringing the evaluation of
this service to the attention of your users. The results could have
important implications for science, publishing and libraries.

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Stevan Harnad                     harnad@cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Professor of Cognitive Science    harnad@princeton.edu
Department of Electronics and     phone: +44 23-80 592-582
             Computer Science     fax:   +44 23-80 592-865
University of Southampton         http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Highfield, Southampton            http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM