Recently, I have had several projects that required me to identify experts in a subject area. When the field of expertise is scientific or medical, often the best way to identify experts is see who has published papers on a topic and who is frequently cited by others.
Now I have a new tool to use - Authoratory.com. This database has data-mined the last six years of PubMed, the huge database of medical literature maintained by the US National Library of Medicine. Authoratory enables you to find the most prolific writers on a topic -- type in a search term and you see a list of authors whose articles cover those topics.
The search result displays a list of the authors; click on any author's name and then things get really interesting. Each author record includes the following information:
- a list of the subject headings most frequently applied to his writing (this helps you discern the author's primary focus)
- a list of the people with whom he has co-authored articles
- the email address(es) listed in the articles he has written
- a list of the organizations he is affiliated with
- information on the grants he has received from the US National Institutes of Health
Since the underlying data is from the PubMed database, the search isn't of the full text of articles but rather the bibliographic records and keywords (specifically, the MeSH subject headings). Given the detail of subject headings in PubMed, this is a useful way to conduct focused, specific searches.
If you need to find people who write frequently about adrenalectomies, malaria in rural populations or melanoma, Authoratory could be your best choice.
I have a few quibbles about Authoratory. My main complaint is that the folks behind it have gone out of their way to mask their contact information. There is no mention of the company or individuals behind this site, no telephone number or address is listed on the site, and the domain is registered through a private registry, so you cannot see who owns the authoratory.com domain. It is disconcerting to put faith in a site that no one is willing to claim as their own. I did find that I got a fast response to a query I sent to support@authoratory.com, and the name and phone number of the principal of Authoratory was in the return email.
There is also a restriction (apparently not strictly enforced) on use of some Authoratory features only by people in academia. The web site offers a paid subscription for non-academicians who want to use Authoratory; pricing is set on a case-by-case basis. 数据挖掘研究院
It's a potentially useful tool for finding information about medical researchers, and it is a great example of how effective data-mining can be in a literature database
