Model and methods of creating a bibliographic electronic platform of national manuscripts and scientific publications

INTRODUCTION

The scientific method is an empirical method of acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the 21th century. It involves careful observation, applying rigorous skepticism about what is observed, given that cognitive assumptions can distort how one interprets the observation. It involves formulating hypotheses, via induction, based on such observations; experimental and measurement-based testing of deductions drawn from the hypotheses; and refinement (or elimination) of the hypotheses based on the experimental findings. These are principles of the scientific method, as distinguished from a definitive series of steps applicable to all scientific enterprises.

Though diverse models for the scientific method are available, there is in general a continuous process that includes observations about the natural world. People are naturally inquisitive, so they often come up with questions about things they see or hear, and they often develop ideas or hypotheses about why things are the way they are. The best hypotheses lead to predictions that can be tested in various ways. The most conclusive testing of hypotheses comes from reasoning based on carefully controlled experimental data. Depending on how well additional tests match the predictions, the original hypothesis may require refinement, alteration, expansion or even rejection. If a particular hypothesis becomes very well supported, a general theory may be developed.

Although procedures vary from one field of inquiry to another, they are frequently the same from one to another. The process of the scientific method involves making conjectures (hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments or empirical observations based on those predictions. A hypothesis is a conjecture, based on knowledge obtained while seeking answers to the question. The hypothesis might be very specific, or it might be broad. Scientists then test hypotheses by conducting experiments or studies. A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable, implying that it is possible to identify a possible outcome of an experiment or observation that conflicts with predictions deduced from the hypothesis; otherwise, the hypothesis cannot be meaningfully tested.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

The purpose of an experiment is to determine whether observations agree with or conflict with the predictions derived from a hypothesis. Experiments can take place anywhere from a garage to CERN's Large Hadron Collider. There are difficulties in a formulaic statement of method, however. Though the scientific method is often presented as a fixed sequence of steps, it represents rather a set of general principles. Not all steps take place in every scientific inquiry (nor to the same degree), and they are not always in the same order.

Mendeley’s crowdsourced catalogue is organized around 25 research disciplines and 473 subdisciplines. This classification scheme represents a conceptual structure that not only serves to organize the bibliographic references, but is present in the arrangement of groups and profiles as well. These subject classes come from the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a consortium of libraries assembled to reduce costs and improve access to information.

Mendeley uses a peculiar criterion to assign papers to these subject classes. This process is made according to the readers of the documents. Thus a paper is not assigned to a discipline by its content, but by who its readers are. In this way a paper is classified as Mathematics if the highest percentage of its readers come from a Mathematics background. This would be correct if the paper had a large number of readers as it is logical that users would be interested in papers from their own research area. But for the majority of papers which barely reach ten readers (85 per cent), this criterion would produce a certain randomness and generate a serious problem of misclassification. This could mean, for example, that a paper published in a mathematics journal and tagged with mathematics keywords is assigned to Physics because a physicist user decided to include that reference in his or her library. Thus classification is influenced by the readers’ field of study, so as many users from a discipline read a paper more likely that paper is assigned to that disciplinary group. It is not surprising therefore that the thematic distribution of papers coincides with the distribution of users, as will be seen later. To avoid this limitation and increase the findability, Mendeley also links each document with the other two most frequent disciplines of their readers. For example, a paper assigned to Mathematics could be retrieved by Physics and Computer and Information Science as well due to the second and third group of readers belong to those disciplines.

Figure 4.1 and Table 4.3 show the percentage of retrieved, assigned and open papers by discipline, that is records that can be searched in the Papers section

Retrieving documents by discipline, the aggregated total is 66.2 million. As we saw above, this number is arrived at because the same paper can be linked to up to three disciplines. Taking only the principal discipline, the total number of uploaded papers by the users to the public catalogue is 14.7 million documents, a percentage rather low according to the global estimate of 114 million in the system (Pimasoli, 2014). This could indicate that approximately nine out ten documents are privately managed in each user’s library, a figure that is not very optimistic for the sharing of documents in Mendeley.