Thomson Scientific Announces Development of Full Suite of Authorship Tools

PHILADELPHIA and LONDON, June 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Thomson Scientific, a business of The Thomson Corporation Toronto and leading provider of research and development information solutions to the worldwide scientific community, today announced a robust suite of authorship search tools to simplify the tasks of finding and assessing authors' works. Thomson Scientific has worked carefully to craft an effective, large-scale solution to the complex issue of author identification in the world's largest multidisciplinary citation resource, the Web of Science(R), and will be rolling out this initiative beginning July through the end of 2006.

"Through discussions with customers, we realized the daily challenges users face in finding all of an author's works across large multidisciplinary collections and correctly 'disambiguating' them from other authors. A simple, quick-fix solution would not meet our users' needs," said Jim Pringle, vice president, product development, Thomson Scientific. "Instead, we have worked closely with researchers over several years to develop a full suite of offerings to address those challenges."

These new tools help researchers find their own works, or those of a colleague, in a simple, single search. Then, they can analyze and report on these works using the powerful tools available in the ISI Web of Knowledge.

The suite of Thomson authorship tools in development for ISI Web of Knowledge includes:

-- Author Finder Author Finder is a quick process that helps users find papers published by a specific author by leveraging the expert indexing within the ISI Web of Knowledge. Enter a name, then choose from a list of name variants and match the results with subject category and/or institution of the author for whose works you are searching to retrieve works specific to a particular author. -- Author Disambiguation How do you distinguish one V. Lee, from another? Or J. Smith? A remarkable new approach solves this problem across a full century of scholarly information. This key challenge has been the focus of a multi-year research effort within Thomson Scientific that has resulted in powerful "disambiguation" algorithms now being applied across the entire Web of Science. Avoiding the pitfalls of a simplistic solution, all of the elements in the indexed records and the full range of citation relationships have been combined with sophisticated mathematical techniques to organize all records in Web of Science by "authorships" - groups of papers by the same author. -- Biographical and Bibliographical Information for Highly Cited Authors A direct link will be available from these authorship groups to http://www.isihighlycited.com/, a collection of some of the world's most highly cited researchers. Web of Science users can link to biographical and bibliographical information from the ISI Web of Knowledge record. -- Processing Author Full Names Our processing centers now capture full author names for all records that contain them, making it simple to determine whether "J. Smith" is John, James or Jane. About The Thomson Corporation

The Thomson Corporation (http://www.thomson.com/), with 2005 revenues of $8.7 billion, is a global leader in providing integrated information solutions to business and professional customers. Thomson provides value-added information, software tools and applications to more than 20 million users in the fields of law, tax, accounting, financial services, higher education, reference information, corporate e-learning and assessment, scientific research and healthcare. With operational headquarters in Stamford, Conn., Thomson has approximately 40,000 employees and provides services in approximately 130 countries. The Corporation's common shares are listed on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges Toronto.

Thomson Scientific is a business of The Thomson Corporation. Its information solutions assist professionals at every stage of research and development - from discovery to analysis to product development and distribution. Thomson scientific information solutions can be found at http://www.scientific.thomson.com/.