The American Chemical Society (ACS) developed a new taxonomy and indexing system to efficiently classify and handle over 60,000 articles a year in its publications. Lessons learned from building the taxonomy emphasized the importance of early agreement among stakeholders, sufficient collaboration, and user research in establishing effective classification practices. Actions taken included creating a full and visible taxonomy, engaging with internal and external experts for validation, and developing an automated process for taxonomy management.

2. American Chemical Society
Lessons Learned From
Building a Taxonomy and
Indexing 140+ years of
Content
Michael Darr
Columbus, OH
DHUG 2021
February 10

3. © 2021 American Chemical Society
Who is the American Chemical
Society?
A non-profit scientific organization with
more than 140 years’ experience, we are a
champion for chemistry, its practitioners
and our global community of members.
ACS Family: ACS Publications, C&EN
news, CAS, AACT (American Association
of Chemistry Teachers)
ACS Publications is recognized as a
leading publisher of authoritative scientific
information. Our 60+ peer-reviewed
journals are ranked the “most-trusted,
most-cited and most-read”.

4. © 2021 American Chemical Society
ACS Publications Products
ACS publishes across the full spectrum of chemistry
and related sciences and in every print medium.
We’ve published more than
• 1.3 million research articles across more than 60
journals
• 100,000 news stories in award winning C&EN
magazine
• 35,000 book chapter across more than 1,600
books
• 1,000 references and standards in ACS Reagent
Chemicals

5. © 2021 American Chemical Society 5
Where were we starting from?
• In 2016 in partnership with CAS (a sister division of ACS) we
developed in initial Taxonomy for use with ACS Omega, our new a
multidisciplinary open access journal
• Content was indexed manually by CAS scientists during an article’s
production lifecycle
• Terms were available typically just in time for publication, for which
at the time was a relatively small set of content
• Assigned terms were uploaded to our delivery system where they
were displayed on the article page and used to provide a taxonomy-
driven navigation for the journal

6. © 2021 American Chemical Society 6
Where did we need to go?
• Needed a taxonomy that was more customized for ACS
Publication’s needs
• Classify all published content
• Be able to handle processing 60,000+ articles a year in a timely
fashion
• Integrate display into a newly redesigned website
• Lay the groundwork to allow for expanding opportunities for new
non-journal products

7. © 2021 American Chemical Society
SLIDE TITLES SHOULD NOT GO MORE THAN
TWO LINES IN LENGTH.
Lessons From
Building a Taxonomy
Infographic vector created by vectorjuice

8. © 2021 American Chemical Society 8
Lessons From Building a Taxonomy
• Gather information on best practices and others’ experiences
• Get agreement early on from all the business owners on the
requirements for building the taxonomy
– Content domain experts and UI/UX engineers may have differing views
of what the customer and product needs are; establish clear decision
making roles.
• Be aware of complications due to polyhierarchy
– Makes content discoverable under a subject area for which it may not
pertain
– For a publisher prospective authors may try to use it to justify why their
submitted article fits the scope of a journal

9. © 2021 American Chemical Society 9
Lessons From Building a Taxonomy
• Ensure enough time and budget to enable sufficient
collaboration between your taxonomy consultants and
your internal content subject matter experts
• Establish live documents for more interactive
collaboration
• Ensure random sampling of content still includes an
appropriate percentage of research content and high
value content
• Give more time to building content for customer
research
– Dependent on tools being used to facilitate customer
interaction

10. © 2021 American Chemical Society 10
Actions We Took
• Chose to have a “full taxonomy” and a “visible taxonomy”
– The full taxonomy was what was needed to accurately classify the
content
– The visible taxonomy is a subset of the full taxonomy, including only the
top levels and specific terms in those levels to display on our platforms
• Engaged in customer focus research testing two different visible
taxonomies
– Found in individual testing that testers didn’t have any real preference
on the structure (note final versions were not hugely dissimilar)
– Found in A|B Testing on our Platform that the data captured on user
interactions didn’t provide a unanimous customer preference

11. © 2021 American Chemical Society
Visible Taxonomy Display

12. © 2021 American Chemical Society
SLIDE TITLES SHOULD NOT GO MORE THAN
TWO LINES IN LENGTH.
Lessons From
Classifying Content
Infographic vector created by vectorjuice

13. © 2021 American Chemical Society 13
Lessons From Classifying Content
• If you have PDF content, evaluate as early as possible how accurate
automated classification of the content will be
– 120 years of PDF-only content caused issues on being able to
programmatically identify content consistently
– Common issue of skewed indexing results due to content from the
preceding and following articles as the content was generated from
scans of the original text
• Engage platform architects early to fully understand all existing
capabilities and limitations for applying and leveraging the terms
• Consider weighting the text of the article for more accurate results
– Example: Title (8), Abstract (8), Experimental Section (4)

14. © 2021 American Chemical Society 14
Actions We Took
• We developed an internal automated process to derive the visible
taxonomy from the full taxonomy by determining the top 5 terms
• Validation of indexing results at a granular and visible level
– Using internal Subject Matter Experts to ensure consistently
hitting 85% or better accuracy
– Using external customers to verify accuracy of terms displayed
with the article
• Created a process for making adjustments to the visible terms
applied to the content

15. © 2021 American Chemical Society
Thank You!
Michael Darr
IT Project Manager
Publications Production Operations
American Chemical Society
2540 Olentangy River Rd
Columbus, OH
mdarr@acs.org