My Favourite Tipples from a biopharmaceutical specialist
Jinfo Blog

By Andrew Clark

Abstract

My Favourite Tipples are shared by Andrew Clark, director of scientific information services at UCB, a mid-sized biopharmaceutical company based in Belgium. He shares his favourite online resources in areas from strategic planning to real-time information monitoring.

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When I think about resources I use every week it is a combination of resources that help me with my strategic planning as leader of a global information team and resources that bring added insight to the end-user.

My department strategy needs to remain dynamic to ensure that it continues to add value to ever-changing business needs. 

• InfoDesk: I use real-time information monitoring capabilities from InfoDesk to ensure that I am at the forefront of breaking industry news, whether this is specific to a key therapeutic area or is more technology-focused. This helps me to understand potential up-and-coming gamechangers. 

• RightFind: A deeper search and discovery experience is key for the end-user to be able to better explore published information and derive value-added insight.
  Right Find, a Copyright Clearance Center technology, facilitates this with a deep faceted search across millions of citations combining both internal subscriptions and external pay-per-view documents. Combine this with knowledge sharing and digital rights management capabilities and you have an integrated workflow tool that becomes a key component of the researcher's toolkit with access to information and added insight within seconds. A technology like this is critical in an information age where there is much discussion around open access and the challenges of managing this. 

• Altmetric.com: This year we have started to explore the potential for bringing altmetric data into workflows and technologies within the organisation to give some "social" context to certain types of published information. Altmetric.com is a resource that I use frequently to give me and key end-users an additional layer of impact factor based on "social mentions". Creating social patterns around a key piece of scientific literature can bring an intriguing view on the "heritage" of a piece of content and its lifecycle over time, who was mentioning it, where it was mentioned and when.
  
  
• Siri: As for a daily resource that I use, well I do talk to Siri a lot and wonder where the onset of augmented reality might take us...

An article in Jinfo which I found particularly interesting: 

• A recent Jinfo article that was of particular interest to me was "How to build capacity to ensure resilient information services". Critical at a time when many information centres are facing resourcing constraints, the focus in this article is on understanding the potential within your organisation and creating opportunity. This really resonated with many conversations I often have with other information professionals when I speak at industry events.

Contribute your "My Favourite Tipples"

Would you like to share your "My Favourite Tipples" with the Jinfo audience? For contributor guidelines email catherine.dhanjal@jinfo.com or visit the Publish with Jinfo page.

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