In the first half of this year we’ve been talking to our community about post-publication changes and Crossmark. When a piece of research is published it isn’t the end of the journey—it is read, reused, and sometimes modified. That’s why we run Crossmark, as a way to provide notifications of important changes to research made after publication. Readers can see if the resesarch they are looking at has updates by clicking the Crossmark logo.
We’re happy to note that this month, we are marking five years since Crossref launched its Grant Linking System. The Grant Linking System (GLS) started life as a joint community effort to create ‘grant identifiers’ and support the needs of funders in the scholarly communications infrastructure.
The system includes a funder-designed metadata schema and a unique link for each award which enables connections with millions of research outputs, better reporting on the research and outcomes of funding, and a contribution to open science infrastructure.
In our previous blog post about metadata matching, we discussed what it is and why we need it (tl;dr: to discover more relationships within the scholarly record). Here, we will describe some basic matching-related terminology and the components of a matching process. We will also pose some typical product questions to consider when developing or integrating matching solutions.
Basic terminology Metadata matching is a high-level concept, with many different problems falling into this category.
Update 2024-07-01: This post is based on an interview with Euan Adie, founder and director of Overton._
What is Overton? Overton is a big database of government policy documents, also including sources like intergovernmental organizations, think tanks, and big NGOs and in general anyone who’s trying to influence a government policy maker. What we’re interested in is basically, taking all the good parts of the scholarly record and applying some of that to the policy world.
Since we announced last September the launch of a new version of iThenticate, a number of you have upgraded and become familiar with iThenticate v2 and its new and improved features which include:
A faster, more user-friendly and responsive interface
A preprint exclusion filter, giving users the ability to identify content on preprint servers more easily
A new “red flag” feature that signals the detection of hidden text such as text/quotation marks in white font, or suspicious character replacement
A private repository available for browser users, allowing them to compare against their previous submissions to identify duplicate submissions within your organisation
A content portal, helping users check how much of their own research outputs have been successfully indexed, self-diagnose and fix the content that has failed to be indexed in iThenticate.
We’ve received some great feedback from iThenticate v2 users and user testers:
“There are a lot of new and helpful features implemented in version 2 of iThenticate.”
– Beilstein Institut
“The updates to the user interface make working with the new version a pleasure. It has a very modern feel and is easy to use, as an app on a phone. We particularly like being able to click on a link and easily exclude a source from view with just a few clicks. The response time and speed of download are also greatly improved which will cut down processing time on our end.”
– Frontiers
“I like the ability to be able to exclude content directly from the report.”
– American Chemical Society
More information for administrators and users is available on the Turnitin website: iThenticate v2 documentation.
Upgrading to iThenticate v2
In September, we started inviting new and existing Similarity Check subscribers using iThenticate in the browser to upgrade to this new version. And now some of the manuscript submission systems have completed their integrations with the new version of iThenticate too, so users of these systems can start to migrate. Morressier users are already using iThenticate v2, and in the next few days, we will be emailing all eJournalPress users. We know the other major manuscript submission systems are also working on their integrations, and we’ll be in touch with members using them as soon as they confirm they are ready.
Manuscript tracking system integrations
All Similarity Check subscribers using a manuscript management system will particularly appreciate a closer integration with iThenticate v2 which means that users will be able to view their Similarity Report and investigate sources within their manuscript tracking system.
eJournalPress
eJournalPress users will also be able to customise their iThenticate v2 settings via a configuration interface and to decide, for example, to include or exclude bibliographies from their Similarity Reports. The new integration will also show the top five matches returned by iThenticate directly in the eJournalPress interface.
Editorial Manager and ScholarOne
Aries (Editorial Manager) and Clarivate (ScholarOne) are planning to release their iThenticate v2 integrations later this year and we will be inviting users to upgrade in the coming months.
Please check our community forum for updates on manuscript tracking system integrations.
More new and improved features
User-friendly PDF report
“The report is clean and easy to read.”
– The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
“The clickable links will save us a considerable amount of time as they make it easy for the author to understand where the overlap is coming from, meaning we do not need to spend time clarifying overlap reports to the authors. The summary page is also very useful as authors and editors are easily able to see which sections have been included and excluded from the report.”
– Frontiers
The PDF version of the Similarity Report has been completely redesigned and can easily be downloaded, emailed and printed. It contains a summary of the report i.e. word count, character count, number of pages, file size, excluded sections, submission, and report dates as well as the similarity score and a list of the top sources with clickable links.
Custom section exclusion filter
In iThenticate v2, users can now exclude sections that are standard such as authors, affiliations, ethics statements, acknowledgments, etc. from the Similarity Report which often impacts similarity scores. You can choose from the templates available and/or create your own custom section exclusions from the admin portal.
“The user interface is definitely more responsive than v1, especially when I am looking at the full-text viewing mode, scrolling through the text to compare matches, reading through the box of text in the matching source […] I also especially like the options around excluding, I was able to see our submitted work was also taken into the database and showed matches against the papers we’d uploaded already. Going forward, this is a really interesting thing for us, especially if we are looking at duplicated content in the same journal.”
– Taylor & Francis
User reporting
Details of user activity including folder names, similarity scores, word count, and file format are now also available in iThenticate v2 and downloadable as Excel and csv. files.
Up next
Product development
Further enhancements to existing features and interface such as the view full-text mode, user groups, and custom section exclusions are planned for this year. Paraphrase detection and citation matching are currently in development.
iThenticate v2 training
iThenticate v2 documentation is available from the Turnitin website. Training videos and webinars will be available later on in the year.
✏️ Do get in touch via support@crossref.org if you have any questions about iThenticate v1 or v2 or start a discussion by commenting on this blog post below.