Is this about big cats?

No, PUblications Metadata Augmentation (PUMA) is the name of our new publications exploration tool at https://arc-nwc.nihr.ac.uk/resources/publications

What kind of publications?

As part of the ARC NWC we write a lot of scientific articles which are published in peer review journals. This means other independent researchers (our peers) critically read our articles before they are accepted for publication and make judgement on if what we are doing is scientifically correct or not. This is the gold standard of doing science.

So PUMA replaces the list of publications we used to have?

Yes.

What does PUMA do that the old list doesn’t?

Lots of things. Let’s start with searching and exploration. Suppose you are interested in the social prescribing work that has been done in the ARC, historically you would have had to look for the words “social prescribing” on the old list, and hope that they appeared in the title. This would miss titles containing “socially prescribed” or publications which don’t include it in the title at all. PUMA addresses this by getting the keywords for the publications and displaying all the publications for that keyword when it is clicked on. Try it – go to https://arc-nwc.nihr.ac.uk/resources/publications, click on the All Keywords link then pick your favourite keyword to see what we have done on it.

Does it do anything else?

Yes! We can begin to look at metrics on our publications. When other researchers want to refer to our work in their publications, they cite it. This is one metric of the impact our work has, and now we can keep track of this. Have a look at our metrics page to see some numbers and plots. One of our most highly cited publications is one that Clarissa Giebel was involved in, titled – Decision-making for receiving paid home care for dementia in the time of COVID-19: a qualitative study (see https://bmcgeriatr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12877-020-01719-0), which has 24 citations as I write this.

Citations are not the only metrics we can look at – Altmetric offers a service where we can see how our publications are being disseminated in a much broader scope than citations from other publications alone. This is displayed as a colourful doughnut on the right-hand side of each paper listed. Sticking with Clarissa’s paper above, the doughnut currently looks like:

and represents two news outlets, four blogs, 113 tweets and one video which have mentioned it.

Anything else?

PUMA does some other things too, like making it easier to search for specific authors or keywords; showing a map of the first authors’ institutes; showing a word cloud of how frequently words are used in keywords and abstracts (the image at the top shows the current abstract word cloud). Go have a play around with it and let us know what you think.

How does it work? Where does the data come from?

Good question! It’s all about the metadata – that’s what the M stands for in PUMA. Metadata is data about data, it is an integral part of much of the technology we use every day. As an example, when you take a photo with your phone, the time and location are probably stored along with the photo, this is metadata. Another example might be when you phone someone from your mobile, it will keep a log of who you called, how long the call was, what time it was etc – this is metadata about the phone call.

If we think about the content of a publication as the ‘data’ (i.e. the background, method, results, conclusion etc), then the ‘metadata’ is all the information about the publication – the author list, when it was published, the keywords, how many citations it has etc. There are services which collect all this metadata for millions of publications which we can connect to and download the relevant entries. This is how PUMA works.

Dr Becca Wilson and I have been developing PUMA for a couple of years, for different projects. If you want to know more about it, we have written an article about it (https://f1000research.com/articles/9-1095/v2).

– Dr Olly Butters, Care and Health Informatics theme.