Lessons Learned From Building a Taxonomy and Indexing 140 Years of Content Michael Darr, Project Manager, D33 – American Chemical Society Pubs IT Michael will talk about the things they would do differently if they were to build a new taxonomy and index a legacy file, and the things they did right the first time.

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