Healthcare and Science thomsonreuters.com

I first came to Hong Kong some 20 years ago. I began work at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) as a systems librarian and in 2005 I became the manager of the Hong Kong Scholars Hub. The Hub provides simple free open access to our scholarly content. Download statistics show that the Hub content is readily discovered and heavily used around the world.

Our university produces around 3,000 papers a year that go into scholarly peer reviewed journals. The Hub captures a small  percentage of this output, because now there is no policy from HKU for deposit - it's only the library requesting. If the author permits us to place his work online, we must still find a policy from the publisher that also allows.

An area where we have enjoyed large success is that of the HKU postgraduate theses. We are just now finishing retrospective scanning, and will soon have all 17,000 theses online in open access; from 1941 only, as we lost our earliest ones in the WWII occupation. Very few other universities have done this.

The universities' mission has recently been rearticulated into 3 areas: teaching and learning, research, and knowledge exchange. The Hub is one way that the university can show and measure knowledge exchange (KE) with the community. Besides sharing the research output of HKU with the community, it also acts as an expert finder to government and industry, showing on which subjects in which languages HKU scholars are available for media spokesmanship, contract research, consultancies, collaboration, etc. Beyond the issue of KE, the Hub can also act as a database of record for the upcoming HKU Research Assessment Exercise, and a service to easily create publication lists in application for grants. Because each HKU researcher can control and enhance his or her own data, the Hub will forge the necessary culture for KE within HKU and engage staff in delivering the desired outcomes of KE.

The metrics needed to measure HKU research and KE are provided by the Hub, and the Web of Science.

About a year ago I started to look at the problems of searching in Web of Science for Chinese names. Transliterated into Roman, and in the form used by citations, for example, "Chan, KW", they present a formidable obstacle to information discovery. There could be twenty researchers with different Chinese script names, but when Romanized, they all use the same form; "Chan, KW".  Added to this, is the problem of similar university names in Hong Kong; "University of Hong Kong", "Chinese University of Hong Kong", "Hong Kong University of Science and Technology", etc.  It becomes very tedious, sometimes impossible to disambiguate like named researchers, or, unify variant names used by one researcher.

We had a teleconference with Jim Pringle, Vice President of Product Development at Thomson Reuters in March and he told me about the ResearcherID program which neatly solves the above problems, and allows metrics such as paper and citation counts to be quickly retrieved. With their permission, we have created about 900 ResearcherID accounts for the HKU faculties of Dentistry, Medicine, and Engineering. We will likewise create RIDs for the remaining seven faculties. After this work is done, we can quickly harvest the RID metrics to display in the Hub for each HKU researcher. I am told that we are the first institution in the world to do this procedure on the scale that we have done.

I've already had positive feedback on the ResearcherID addition to the Hub. Our Dean of Dentistry is very enthusiastic about KE and research, and their impact. I sent him an html file which displayed all the researchers in the faculty of dentistry, their ResearcherID badges, and hyperlinks into the charts and graphs within ResearcherID. He was much surprised that such could be done and very impressed. After seeing our work, our Pro Vice Chancellor for Research  asked me to begin a roadshow around campus to explain ResearcherIDs and the newly enhanced Hub.

Some months ago, we implemented the Web of Science API so that articles in the Hub matching those in Web of Science will now display the citation counts from Web of Science. We have plans to bring in more article and author level metrics from other databases, social network tagging done by scientists, blog coverage written by scientists, etc.