WebPlus Beta Comes Online

For those of you who are not familiar with Thomson Scientific, they are a division of the Thomson Corporation that acts as a technical provider creating integrated solutions used by researchers, information specialists, and professionals in the fields of biotechnology, chemistry, engineering, healthcare, law, financial services, higher education, reference information, corporate training, and assessment.

People who are very lucky have access to Thomson Scientific products through their employer, school, or library. Recently they have opened a beta tool to the public. This is a specialized search engine for people who need to get serious facts from reliable, well vetted, sources. This new service can be a great help to bloggers, students, or just people who like to arm themselves with research results to settle arguments.

The search site allows you to focus on topics, individual scientists or authors, journals (Source), institution, organism (including micro-organisms), drugs/medications, and even genes.

Sure you could search for these things on Google, and WebPlus provides much of the same information. The difference, however, is the WebPlus results are weighted by reputation. This means the most thoroughly vetted, reliable, and trustworthy sources appear at the top of the list. The Thomson Scientific researchers are working to assign unbiased relative values to research sources based on quality of those sources. This is quite different from Google’s popularity based results that work well for most searches.

They describe it this way:

Thomson Scientific WebPlus brings you the Web content you seek by focusing first on scientifically relevant Web sites selected by Thomson Scientific editors. When a search is begun, the results are filtered, ranked and sorted based on relevancy. Thomson Scientific WebPlus saves you time by getting rid of irrelevant Web content from search results and allow you to focus on only the scientifically relevant results from the open Web!

The presentation of the WebPlus results is another nice feature. It produces a clean and simple tabbed result page. IT gives you all results with a count, and then breaks out News Results, Blog Results, and multimedia results.

This is where it really gets cool! You can filter the main search results in all kinds of fun ways. If you click on the Filter Results by Subject you get the lovely subject tag cloud as shown below.

This tag cloud serves two excellent uses. First, by looking at the size of the various topics, you can tell, at a glance whether or not the search terms you used were appropriate for the information you are trying to find. Secondly, you can quickly drill down to a subset of results that deal with the specific topic you want. And if you don’t like what you found, you don’t have to start over. Just click the Subject filter to pick a new topic, or click the Remove Filter to go back to the full list.

You can also filter by Top Level Domain. I’m not sure how useful this feature would be for most people. Conceivably, a blogger in London who is writing for a primarily British audience may want to focus first on research from outside the UK since everyone knows that many people are prone to believing an outside expert over someone local. It also may be useful to focus on educational sources via the edu filter or the government (gov) filter. The Other URLs filter will display results from domains that only occur once in the results.

Finally, you can filter the results by file format. In this case, they are all html or pdf files.

One thing that I personally like about this system is that when you click a link in the search results, you get the results in a full width lower frame with the WebPlus info at the top. This allows you to easily return to your search results. You can easily remove the WebPlus frame by clicking the Hide Search Frame option in the upper right. You can also rate the quality of each item you find. I assume this will provide feedback to the Thomson Scientific Web of Knowledge editors who are working on this project.

I don’t normally get annoyed by people’s sources, but after reviewing Inhofe’s EPW report on scientists who are portrayed as “skeptical” about climate change, and the sheer volume of fringe science that people want to have taken as seriously as the IPCC reports over on blogcatalog.com in a recent Climate Change discussion, I think that this kind of resource is needed by bloggers and regular citizens both. If more people took the time to research their postings the way Will over at willtaft.com does, this would not be necessary.

To access WebPlus Beta you need to go to http://isiwebofknowledge.com and then click on the WebPlus Beta button. From there, you can use the link at the bottom of the page to access the Search tool. You cannot go directly to the search page I used in the screen shot. All traffic to that page must come in via the ISI Web of Knowledge web site. Once there, you can bookmark the search tool making sure your bookmark contains the Web of Knowledge key in the URL.