NASIG 2021

A growing number of new public citation databases, available free of charge and accessible on the open web, are offering researchers a new place to start their searching, providing an alternative to Google Scholar and library resources. These new “public discovery services,” sites such as Semantic Scholar and Meta, index significant portions of scholarly literature, then differentiate themselves by applying technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to create results sets which are promoted as more meaningful, easier to navigate and more engaging than other discovery options.

Additionally, these new public discovery services are adding new linking technologies that connect researchers from citation records to full text content licensed on their behalf by their affiliated libraries. This linking is often seamless so it may not always be obvious to end users that access is enabled by their library.

With these new sites logging millions of sessions a month, they present unique opportunities for libraries to connect to researchers working outside the library and challenges in making how the library can make itself obvious in the user workflow.

This presentation will provide an overview of the new public discovery services, describe the mechanisms to link to full text, and discuss the implications for libraries.