Edit: arxangel.net has been shut down for the time being. Many thanks to everyone who helped out with advice and feedback. I was thrilled to see arxangel being used regularly by a global audience, but sadly it was never enough to make it sustainable long-term.
ArXangel.net has a few features which I’ve covered in past blog posts, but the latest feature is a sign-in function.
- Any ORCID member can click a button to sign-up
- Once you’ve done this, arXangel will check your ORCID history, read all of your papers and will use those to figure out what you like to read.
- Then, the following day, you can log in and find a feed of new preprints in your area of interest.
There are lots of services out there for searching for preprints or even for building recommendations (e.g. input some keywords, or pick a list of related papers and get given a feed of new preprints), but I can’t think of another one that does it with just 1 or 2 clicks. So, in that sense, arXangel is novel and easy to use.
If you signed up over the weekend, you should now be seeing a feed of new preprints in your area of interest.
A few things users might want to be aware of:
- A couple of new sign-ups had no history in ORCID. I am not sure if this is down to having no published papers recorded in ORCID, or if it is caused by privacy settings preventing arXangel from seeing the full ORCID record ( a manual check simply shows no papers). If arXangel can’t find any history in ORCID, then sadly you won’t see any recommendations.
- Some people who signed up didn’t get recommendations the following day. Sorry about that. It turns out that a number of new sign ups were highly prolific individuals, so it took arXangel a long time to read all of their papers, which in turn delayed the process for other users. I’ve built a workaround for that problem now. It’s my fault, I should have anticipated that arXangel would attract the best and brightest ;)
Also — big thank you to everyone who filled out the arXangel feedback survey. Your feedback is a very helpful source of insight.
A good time to take stock?
ArXangel.net has been around for a few months now.
It’s a hobby project and it’s been a valuable way for me to learn about putting data analytics into practice in a real-world application.
The services arXangel offers include:
- Recommended preprints for journal editors
- Recommended referees, journals and similar articles for arXiv preprints
- Recommended preprints for individuals (new!)
One big surprise is that a lot of users will browse arXangel. I’d intended that arXangel would only show simple lists of items which people could look at and then, presumably, click through to anything that interested them on arXiv. But it seems that people will actually spend time exploring content on arXangel. That was unintentional and it’s given some pause for thought — is there a need for better browsing tools? I’d thought there were enough of those.
There are a few regular hits to the recommendations for journal editors. This is nice to see, but as a former journal editor myself, I think that service would need to develop a lot to be useful to journal editors long-term.
Thanks again to everyone who signed up. I’m looking forward to your feedback on the service as it is. If you feel like something is missing in the world of preprints, you can let me know via arXangel’s feedback survey.
P.S. It’s become something of a running joke, but according to the available data, arxangel.net has never had a single hit from Denmark. If any Danes are reading this, please do check out arXangel.net!
