News
- María José López Pourailly
LA Referencia launches the new version of its search engine
LA Referencia announced the release of the new version of the aggregator of scientific publications, with features that add even more value to the service: end users can now perform their search among thousands of integrated papers in a multilingual environment, with simple routes for navigation and an adaptive interface for mobile devices.
Around 800,000 documents are already integrated into this new version of the searcher, among scientific articles, masters and doctoral dissertations and technical reports from hundreds of repositories of the nine Latin American countries that are part of the regional initiative.
The launch of the new version coincides with the two years of the Declaration of Buenos Aires, enacted in November of 2012 by the nine countries as a political commitment for the creation of actions related to Open Access and Institutional Repositories. The agreement laid the foundation for the development of common strategies that led to the construction of the Latin American scientific production "colector", integrated by the national nodes of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela.
The search engine for scientific publications of LA Referencia began as a pilot project and gradually became a service whose consolidation required organizing and technical agreements between the involved countries. To facilitate this motion, each country manages a repository central infrastructure which, in turn, uploads the articles to another regional platform on which they can be recognized under the same methodology.
The new version of the aggregator allowed a considerable improvement in the search times; there have been advances in the provision of tools to detect errors, such as duplication of information, and to generate diagnoses of national and regional operation; the techniques of generating statistics were improved and now are even more reliable. Above all, were created options to allow the experience of the new search engine to be easily replicated in the national nodes.
