STM pub­lisher Springer Science+Business Media, Ger­many, has launched AuthorMapper.com, a free ana­lyt­i­cal online tool for dis­cern­ing trends, pat­terns and sub­ject experts within sci­en­tific research.

The por­tal cur­rently searches over three mil­lion jour­nal arti­cles to deliver a vari­ety of use­ful infor­ma­tion. The cur­rent search­able con­tent is from all Springer jour­nals. Meta­data from other STM pub­lish­ers will be included in the near future. The tool can pro­vide a vari­ety of analy­ses, such as key­word tag clouds and “Top 5″ bar charts for var­i­ous impor­tant met­rics, and includes an inter­ac­tive world map of the results.

AuthorMapper.com’s advanced search func­tion also allows com­plex queries using key­word, dis­ci­pline, insti­tu­tion, jour­nal and author. The results can iden­tify new and his­toric sci­en­tific trends through time­line graphs and bar charts of top sta­tis­tics, allow­ing for iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of trends in the lit­er­a­ture, dis­cov­ery of wider sci­en­tific rela­tion­ships, and locat­ing other experts in a field of study.

The trend time­line graph, for instance, allows authors to see whether their area of exper­tise is grow­ing or has already peaked. Users that are only inter­ested in open access con­tent can restrict their searches accord­ingly, and all search results pro­vide link-outs to con­tent on Springer­Link. For grad­u­ates, post-docs and emerg­ing researchers, AuthorMapper.com shows which insti­tu­tions are the most pro­lific in spe­cific research areas and allows for their comparison.

AuthorMapper.com’s can even be use­ful for mem­bers of the gen­eral pub­lic seek­ing to iden­tify experts, for exam­ple, med­ical spe­cial­ists, work­ing close to where they are located.