image: Figure 1. Features and Expected Effects of CiNII Research's New Functions
Credit: © NII
Background of New Function Development
CiNii Research*1 mainly contains papers written in Japan, and since half of these papers are written in Japanese, it was necessary to use Japanese keywords to search for Japanese papers. For this reason, users accessing CiNii Research from overseas still account for only 15% of the total, and how to disseminate information about Japanese papers and expand their use overseas has become an issue.
Features and Expected Effects of New Functions
Therefore, NII made use of machine translation to create English indexes in advance for the metadata (titles, authors, abstracts, etc.) of Japanese papers included in CiNii Research. An evaluation was conducted to ensure that the metadata of the Japanese papers could be matched with English keyword inputs, and the results confirmed that opportunities to discover Japanese papers in English significantly improved (the number of search results increased by about 1.5 times).*2
Following this, NII developed a trial version that extends the metadata of all Japanese papers included in CiNii Research into English. In the trial version, by additionally implementing a function to display a list of Japanese papers shown as search results in English, users who had previously been unable to use CiNii Research due to not understanding Japanese will be able to search for Japanese papers using English keywords, which is expected to promote the use of Japanese papers from overseas.
Release Date and Future Plans
The trial version developed this time retains the existing ease of use of CiNii Research while enhancing searching and displaying results when entering English keywords. Japanese-to-English translation is pre-executed in bulk, and the translation results are accumulated, so there is no delay in search time compared to existing services. This trial version will be released on October 21, 2024 (Monday) on CiNii Labs,*3 which is a portal site for publishing CiNii Research experimental services and content. Based on the results of the trial, the plan is to incorporate this feature into the official version of CiNii Research and offer it during FY2025.
*1 CiNii Research: https://support.nii.ac.jp/en/cir/manual_outline
*2 “Attempt to Expand Overseas Users by Using Machine Translation in the Academic Information Search Service CiNii”(in Japanese) presented at the 32nd annual conference of the Japan Society of Information and Knowledge, 2024
*3 CiNii Labs: https://labs.ci.nii.ac.jp/index_en.html