Three Questions: Jeanine McSweeney, Associate Librarian, Scholarly Communications

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For our next Three Questions interview, we spoke with Jeanine McSweeney, Associate Librarian, Scholarly Communications.

What areas can you help MSK users with?

I manage Synapse, the authoritative database of MSK authors and their publications. The Synapse Team tracks and adds new publications by MSK authors and organizes them under author profiles. Within Synapse you will find links to the full-text of a work, Altmetrics and citation counts, and integration with ORCID iD. I work with various departments at MSK to create customized groups of authors, helping them to track, showcase, and report on the publication output of their departments. Basically, if you have questions about managing your own or your department’s publications, or finding ways to demonstrate your research impact, I am here to help.

What projects have you been working on recently?

My fish tank, a recent trip to Watkins Glen, and me.

Over the summer we released our annual Synapse Publications Report, which highlights the publication output of our MSK researchers. Right now my team is working on restructuring the Synapse “journal articles” category so that our users can better pull out just the peer-reviewed research articles for their grant and reporting needs. Currently Synapse includes non-peer reviewed formats in the “journal article” category like editorials, letters, reviews etc., and we have learned from our users that breaking this down would be more helpful. We aim to have our workflow in place by the end of the year so that moving forward, pulling out needed data from Synapse is even more convenient for our users.

If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?

When able, my first trip will be to Germany so I can visit with my partner’s family that I have not seen now in over a year. Aside from that, I read a lot of Agatha Christie when I was young and have romanticized notions of the English countryside that I would love to spend time exploring. So one of my bucket list trips is to spend a few weeks touring around England and the rest of the UK.