Wiley Launches Web Portal to Connect Researchers

By Bio-IT World Staff

January 8, 2014 | Academic publisher John Wiley & Sons today announced a partnership with Boston-area startup Knode to launch a cloud-based portal where users can search for experts in all fields of biomedical research. Knode, founded in 2011 to help connect researchers working in similar fields, provides the infrastructure and computing tools for the platform, which generates detailed profiles of scientific experts based on their publications, grants, clinical trials and patents. To access this information, the platform mines publicly-available datasets like abstracts on Pubmed, data that is then combined to rank individuals by their expertise in specific research areas. Users can search for experts by name or by subject area. As the platform is refined, it will also be possible to further filter search results: a startup biomedical company looking for potential collaborators, for instance, might give more weight to relevant patents, while an editor looking for peer reviewers might be more interested in authorship.

The platform is publicly available, in beta form, at knodeinc.com, and researchers who find their own profiles can register to better refine their information. Said Sean Pidgeon, VP and Director of Research Solutions at Wiley, in a statement, “By building a network that emphasizes the broad expertise of scientists rather than narrow measures based on the research literature, Knode has created exciting opportunities to enhance the quality of collaborative research.”