Moving from the lab bench to a science information center could be a challenging career change. Looking back at her professional life as a chemist, microbiologist, biochemist, information specialist, librarian, and editor, the author of this book discusses how timing, technology, and luck have taken her across borders, continents, and cultures and have influenced her thinking, interests, and motivation.
Hang on to ideas until they mature.
John Mellencamp (on The Today Show, September, 2014)
In the technologically complex environment in which we are working today, the fear of missing some important piece of information is becoming more and more palpable. Writing a book is an endless process, especially if the topics you are writing about are changing very quickly. You think you have included the latest information and then suddenly you learn of something you have never heard of before that is common knowledge to others. At some point, you have to stop gathering information, reading articles, discussing your book with people, attending conferences and taking notes, and reading e-mails sent to Listservs.
People write books for different reasons. Sometimes they even cannot explain why they are doing it. As for me, I know why I wrote this book—it is because of Eugene Garfield. Early in my research career, I became fascinated with his essays published in a little weekly journal called Current Contents (Garfield, 1979). These essays triggered my interest in information science (Garfield, 2014) and the thought that someday I would be part of this world has always stayed in the back of my mind and later made my transition from the lab bench to librarianship seamless.
Eugene Garfield created the Science Citation Index (SCI) and was the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia. The SCI became the basis for important information products such as Web of Science, Essential Science Indicators, and Journal Citation Reports (JCR). Several years ago, I interviewed Dr. Garfield (Baykoucheva, 2006) and later regretted about not asking him some more questions. I feel honored that he agreed to do another interview for this book, which is included in Chapter 12.
It is sometimes difficult for people with nontraditional careers to explain to others what has driven them through all their professional paths. The scientific revolution that has led to major discoveries in science and technology—the advancements in the exploration of space, the elucidation of the structure of DNA, and the discovery of new drugs—created an atmosphere of optimism about the role that science could play in making society better, and I wanted to be part of this revolution. The life and work of Marie Curie played a significant role in my choosing chemistry for my undergraduate education. I was prepared to endure the hardships of a scientific career—spending endless hours in the lab while working with toxic chemicals and infectious agents—to live out the experience of being a scientist.
My interest in understanding how microorganisms cause diseases and how these diseases can be prevented or cured made me redirect my career from chemistry to infectious microbiology. I spent a significant part of my research career at the Institute of Microbiology of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. My initial research was focused on the chemical basis of bacterial pathogenicity and the mechanisms by which virulent strains of bacteria survive and overcome the defense systems of the body. It was not easy for me, being trained as a chemist, to learn how to work in sterile conditions and protect myself and my colleagues from getting infected with the dangerous bacteria we had in the lab. When I started my graduate work, my daughter was ten months old, and I still remember how every night, before going to sleep, I tried to remember all the steps and procedures that I had gone through in the lab during the day, to make sure that I had not exposed myself to the highly virulent strains of bacteria that I was handling.
Along with performing research in the lab, I began writing articles for popular science and literary journals on a broad range of topics. My interest in languages created a parallel career for me as a translator and editor of scientific and other publications. The long list of my activities as a translator includes a psychology book on transactional analysis (I'm OK, You're OK by Thomas Harris, originally published 1969), which was published by a major publisher in Bulgaria.
My stay in Paris for one year as a postdoctoral fellow of the International Atomic Energy Agency opened a new chapter in my life, as it allowed me to learn new modern research techniques and broadened my interests in European culture, languages, and history. Upon my return to Bulgaria, I wrote articles about different aspects of cultural life in France, historical places that I had visited, and books that I had enjoyed. An article about a literary TV talk show, Apostrophes, which had dominated French intellectual life and had influenced the reading habits of the nation for more than a decade, was published in a popular weekly newspaper with very large circulation.
An essay about Zelda Fitzgerald’s book, Save Me the Waltz, published in a literary newspaper, reflected my interest in the life and works of American writers living in Paris in the 1920s—an interest I have preserved until today. How could I have imagined that this essay, written in a Slavic language, would be downloaded over 100 times from a US university repository 30 years later?
In 1990, after applying for a position for a visiting scientist advertised in the journal Science, I came to the United States and worked at the Department of Microbiology, Molecular Genetics, and Immunology of the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Kansas. There, I investigated the effects of the cellular membrane lipid environment of macrophages on both the expression of cell receptors for bacterial lipopolysaccharides (LPS) and the capacity of these cells to respond to LPS by producing tumor necrosis factor (TNF).
The most productive period in my career as a scientist came when I was offered a position at the Department of Medical Biochemistry of Ohio State University (OSU), where I had the opportunity to collaborate with Dr. Howard Sprecher, a distinguished scientist in the field of fatty acid metabolism. Our studies led to discovering new fundamental information about the way fatty acids are synthesized and degraded in the liver by small membranes called peroxisomes. These findings provided an important clue to how the brain and the eyes obtain specific fatty acids required for normal organ function. The nine papers that we published in some of the most prestigious biochemistry journals continue to be cited every year.
A career change is a serious thing and has to be prepared years before making the decisive step. Reading Eugene Garfield’s essays for years and publishing articles on topics outside of my area of research made this transition easy for me. While still doing research, I enrolled in Kent State University’s master’s program in library science, which had a branch on OSU campus. The beginning of my library career coincided with the exponential growth of the Internet, which provided me with many job opportunities both in academia and in special libraries. For eight years, I was manager of the Library and Information Center (LIC) of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Washington, DC, a position that entailed providing information to the editors of the ACS journals and particularly to the editors of the ACS flagship weekly magazine Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN). For an important publication with a large circulation (around 200,000), having accurate content was vital, which, combined with the short deadlines, put enormous pressure on me. For five years, I also served as a voluntary editor of the ACS organizational monthly newsletter The Phoenix. At the ACS, I was able to gain an insider’s view of the scientific publishing field, attend many professional conferences in the United States and abroad, and establish long-lasting connections with many scientists, editors of scientific journals, publishers, and librarians.
In 2005, I joined the University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries in College Park as head of the White Memorial Chemistry Library, where I am responsible for the day-to-day management of a busy branch library (with annual attendance of around 145,000), serving also as a subject liaison for chemistry and biochemistry, teaching scientific information, performing collection development, and doing research. Teaching is an activity that has given me a lot of satisfaction. In the past ten years, I have conducted over 300 library instruction sessions (over 6000 participants) in a broad range of undergraduate and graduate courses, as well as in Professional Writing Program courses and honors programs.
In 2010, together with two other librarians from UMD, I took part in the eScience Institute, a six-month educational course offered by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). As part of this program, we evaluated the readiness of the university to support eScience, interviewed administrators, gathered information about similar initiatives in peer institutions, and wrote a report, which proposed steps for implementing eScience support on campus.
As readers will see, a major theme in this book is STEM publishing. STEM stands for “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.” It is an inclusive term used to separate these disciplines from other areas of scholarship. STEM is usually part of a compound name—STEM disciplines, STEM departments (in universities), STEM education, and STEM publishing. Governments have started paying more attention to STEM (education and publishing, in particular), and they are concerned that universities are not up to the task of preparing students for the new challenges imposed by new digital technologies and global competition. So STEM, in whatever context this term is used, is “en vogue.”
Organizing scientific information is at the core of doing science. We cannot imagine what science would have looked like today without the Periodic Table of the Elements in which Dmitrii Mendeleev not only arranged the existing chemical elements but also included reserved spaces for those not yet discovered (Gordin, 2004; Scerri, 2006). The management of scientific information starts with how scientists gather information, organize their data, and communicate their findings. Today, they can “hang out” in the same environment where they can do so many things—search for literature and property information at the same time; see how many times an article they were looking at has been viewed, downloaded, and cited; forward an interesting article to others and comment on it; and find out what others are saying about their own research on Twitter and Facebook. Creating, organizing, searching, finding, and managing scientific information are all “moments” that blend seamlessly with research activity at the lab bench and into our lives.
With science becoming more and more interdisciplinary and the volume of data growing at unprecedented speed, there is a need to look at scientific information and how we manage it from a new perspective. The digital environment and interactive technologies using Web 2.0-based tools allow performing research and organizing, managing, and sharing scientific information in a much more efficient way.
As editor of the Chemical Information Bulletin, published by the Division of Chemical Information (CINF) of the ACS, I had the opportunity to interview librarians, researchers, editors, publishers, and experts in scientific information who shared their views on scientific information and publishing. The preliminary work that I did in preparation for these interviews and the discussions that followed have informed my thinking, writing, and teaching. I am very grateful to all who have generously shared their knowledge and enthusiasm about the new developments in their particular fields. I consider these interviews to be an integral part of this book—they are an extension to it. All interviews can be viewed at the CINF Web site at www.acscinf.org/content/interviews, but I would like to mention here those of them that are directly related to the topic of this book.
In 2007, Bryan Vickery, who was then editorial director of Chemistry Central, discussed the open-access movement and how it was affecting STEM publishing (Baykoucheva, 2007b). Maureen Rouhi, editor in chief of the ACS magazine Chemical & Engineering News, analyzed the challenges presented by the globalization of science and how it affects scientific publishing (Baykoucheva, 2013).
Alfred Bader, founder of the largest company for research chemicals in the world, the Aldrich Chemical Company (now Sigma-Aldrich), who is also a scholar of the history of chemistry and a renowned expert on Dutch paintings, shared with me his enthusiasm about the connections between chemistry and art and deliberated on the authorship in scientific discoveries (Baykoucheva, 2007a).
The impact of Russian chemists on European science and how one of the most remarkable resources for chemical information, the Beilstein Handbook of Organic Chemistry, was created are discussed in an interview with David E. Lewis, chemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire (Baykoucheva, 2008b). The chemistry database we now use under the name of Reaxys includes the electronic version of the Handbook. Arnold Thackray, a former president of the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, looked at the history of this organization and its role in promoting chemistry and chemical information (Baykoucheva, 2008a).
The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics is a major chemical information resource. David R. Lide, its long-time editor in chief, describes in his interview how such a complicated handbook has organized chemical information in a unique and easy-to-use way (Baykoucheva, 2009). In her interview, Maryadele O’Neil, senior editor of The Merck Index, described how this versatile chemical reference resource was compiled and published (Baykoucheva, 2010b). The Merck Index was acquired by the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2012.
Eric Scerri, a philosopher of science at UCLA, looked at scientific discovery, organization of information, and the significance of the Periodic Table of the Elements from a historical and philosophical point of view (Baykoucheva, 2010c). Michael Gordin, director of Graduate Studies in History of Science at Princeton University, showed how the cultural environment “of an epoch, a country, a region, or an organization influence the developments in science and the public attitude about it” (Baykoucheva, 2011b). He pointed out to the importance of such factors as “the experimental equipment and resources available to the scientist, his or her level of education and preparation, access to communication from other scientists, and the general state of science at the time.” Gordin also discussed plagiarism, scientific fraud, and pseudoscience from the point of view of a historian of science.
James L. Mullins, Dean of Purdue University Libraries, discussed eScience and the involvement of academic librarians in supporting data management (Baykoucheva, 2011c). The challenges for science librarians in a “big data” world were discussed in interviews with Grace Baysinger, the chemistry librarian of Stanford University (Baykoucheva, 2011a), and Andrea Twiss-Brooks, Co-director of the Science Libraries Division of the University of Chicago’s John Crerar Library (Baykoucheva and Twiss-Brooks, 2012).
This book discusses topics and issues that are both broad and complex. Librarians will find in it information about new areas in which they could get involved to support education and research in their institutions. They can also use some of the presented practical solutions when teaching scientific information and citation management. Vendors of scientific databases may find some useful feedback about how their products are used and what needs to be improved.
How scientific research is evaluated, recognized, and perceived affects the lives of scientists, the distribution of research funds, and the entire process of doing science. The book provides information about metrics to evaluate the quality of research and how the new area of altmetrics is trying to measure attention to research. Readers will learn what eScience is and how research data can be managed by adopting electronic laboratory notebooks. The strategies for managing scientific information and research data suggested in the book could be of interest to students, researchers, and librarians and to those who just want to make their information gathering more efficient.
To many people, “managing scientific information” means using EndNote, Mendeley, Zotero, or other bibliographic management programs. But it is more than that—it is a process that depends on how scientists communicate their findings and opinion; how their articles are evaluated, published, and disseminated; how secondary publishers and social media cover, filter, and make scientific information available; and how readers access this information, share it with others, and use it. New technologies, new thinking, and social networking are changing how research is performed and communicated today. The 16 chapters of this book look at how scientific information and research data can be made more manageable:
Chapter 1 is an introduction to this book. It explains why the book was written and how the topic of managing scientific information and research data could be viewed from different angles and perspectives.
Chapter 2 discusses the changes in scientific communication and STEM publishing. As the expectations of making research results openly available are growing and traditional forms of peer review and publishing are challenged by emerging models, researchers are changing how they communicate their findings.
Chapter 3 deliberates on the consequences of scientific fraud and plagiarism and the impact of unethical conduct on the careers of scientists and the reputations of institutions. This chapter also includes information about some new technologies that scientific publishers are using to detect manipulation of data and plagiarism before the papers submitted for publication enter the publication process.
Chapter 4 is an interview with the associate editor of the ACS Journal of Physical Chemistry, who gives an insider’s view on how articles submitted for publication are processed and evaluated.
Chapter 5 could be looked at as a guide for searching, refining, and managing scientific information.
Chapter 6 compares different bibliographic management programs and outlines strategies for integrating bibliographic management in the teaching of scientific information.
Chapter 7 includes an interview with Chérifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri, lecturer in Information and Communication Science at Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University, who gives an interesting perspective on how graduate students and experienced researchers in French academic institutions gather information and use social media.
Chapter 8 discusses what eScience is about and how academic libraries are getting involved in supporting the data management needs of researchers.
Chapter 9 presents an overview of electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs) and how they can be used to record, share, manage, and preserve research data.
Chapter 10 includes an interview with Gary Wiggins, one of the most prominent figures in the field of chemical information, who discusses the challenges presented by the complexity of chemical information and the changing role of science librarians.
Chapter 11 is a critical analysis of metrics such as Journal Impact Factor (IF), h-index, Google Scholar Citations, and Scopus Journal Analyzer, which are used to evaluate scientific research.
Chapter 12 includes an interview with Eugene Garfield, who describes how he came up with the idea of using citations included in scientific articles to organize and manage information. He also provides a historical perspective of the Science Citation Index and how it has “underwritten” what we now know as Web of Science.
Chapter 13 includes excerpts from a previously published interview with Bonnie Lawlor (Baykoucheva, 2010a), who worked at the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) for 28 years and later held high-level positions at other organizations dealing with scientific information. In her interview she vividly describes the atmosphere at ISI during those pivotal years when such innovative products as the Science Citation Index, Current Contents, and other science resources were created and what it was like to work with Eugene Garfield.
Chapter 14 looks at the use of social media by researchers and how the new area of altmetrics is attempting to measure attention to research.
Chapter 15 discusses the unique authors’ identifiers, such as ORCID, ISNI, and ResearcherID and how publishers are handling authors’ names. Information about some unique identifiers for chemical names is also included in this chapter.
Chapter 16 captures the author’s views about the future involvement of academic librarians in supporting research and education in their institutions.
At the 2012 annual conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) held in Helsinki (Finland), a discussion took place during one of the presentations, when a librarian from a Finnish public library reported that their library had introduced two new services. They called one of these services “Ask Us Anything,” and the other one was promoted as “Ask a Librarian.” While the first service had been bombarded with requests, the “Ask a Librarian” barely received any. They concluded that using the word “librarian” might have discouraged people from using the service, as users might have perceived it as a more formal engagement. Academic libraries need to reimagine themselves and find new roles to play in their institutions. What has worked in the past is not working anymore, and librarians are already feeling the impact. The consequences of not doing it soon enough could be very significant. In this book the challenges for academic libraries posed by the new technologies and higher expectations from higher education are discussed along with the new roles they could play in the future in supporting research and education in their institutions.
We should really feel lucky that we are living at a time when so much scientific information is available and so many sophisticated tools allow us to retrieve, refine, and manage it. We also need to realize that there is a lot of incorrect and incomplete information on the Internet, sometimes even in journal articles that have been vetted through peer review. As every scientist knows, the provenance of data is a prerequisite of whether we will trust the information or ignore it. I would like to suggest that even if you trust what you hear and see, still verify it.
Looking back, I see how fortunate I have been to come across so many interesting opportunities and meet such extraordinary people. The scope of my research has allowed me to establish close professional and even personal ties with many scientists in the United States, France, and many European countries. In this book, I have shared my own experiences and showed how modern technologies and the Internet have changed how science is performed, communicated, and shared. I hope I have succeeded in this effort.