Discovery Platform J-Gate Designed to Aid Researchers

Ask any researcher and they will tell you the long hours they put in, it could be anywhere between 60–80 hours per week studying, teaching or doing research. If the researcher is married and a parent, they can pretty much forget the work-life balance. The pressures can reach unsustainable levels when deadlines for paper submissions approach. There is need of a platform that can help scholars to save time in searching for reviewed research articles and provide a comprehensive source to discover maximum information.

A product made in India, called J-Gate, is a comprehensive discovery platform that provides a researcher with single point access to millions of research articles on various subject areas, making the researcher’s life a lot simpler.

J-Gate is a product of Informatics founded in the year 1980, with a focus on transforming the education space which inevitably has many relative challenges. Over the years, Informatics has remained true to its cause, developing and providing solutions that aid researchers, academicians, and scholars. Being observant of the changing landscape the company has always adapted to stay ahead of the curve and provide their user base with quality services and products.

N V Satyanarayana, the chairman and managing director states that "J-Gate is focussed on facilitating research. Research is a time-consuming process and requires a single-minded focus on just acquiring research sources. J-Gate proves to be an ally as it allows them to focus purely on their research and not on struggling with research material. The sheer content coverage of the database ensures that a researcher can find what they are looking for without any hassle. If the need arises, a researcher can also reach out to an author through J-Gate.”

The platform aims to alleviate the researcher’s time and effort spent on open search platforms for relevant journal articles. The researchers would be able to discover from a comprehensive content coverage of 48,000+ journals, set alerts for their desired journals and store reference article links on the cloud for easy access.

J-Gate enables it’s users to set alerts on specific keywords or author names as well. Whenever there is an update of new article the user will receive a notification via email or RSS feed update. Along with the functionality of Author Finder, researchers can discover the Co-Authors also using the platform.

Talking about the platform, Dr. H Anil Kumar, Librarian and Head NICMAN, IIM Ahmedabad said, “Discovery of content by authors is an excellent feature, it makes it very convenient and easy for the librarian to share resources. If the libraries are considering the implementation of a discovery service, then J-Gate is an option to consider. The pricing of J-Gate is very relevant and apt for the Indian markets.”

"If the full-text article is not available, the user can reach out to the author by clicking on the author’s name. Our students are using this facility effectively, and authors are responding within 2-3 days of reaching out. When a research scholar wants a particular article, this is an excellent feature." said Dr. Bhojaraju Gunjal, Head of Central Library, NIT ROURKELA

If a researcher is not able to gain access to an article or journal, they can request the librarian to subscribe to the specific journal instead of subscribing in bulk. Wherein, many journals may remain unused.. J-Gate also provides a Find in a Library functionality to see which libraries have the access to a particular journal and request them for a specific article as a inter library loan. This functionality, however is restricted to consortiums and/or discretion of the libraries.

Acknowledging that researchers need ‘options to choose from’ in an ever-evolving landscape, J-Gate has provided methods to sort through research material using various advanced filter options available on the platform. The focus is to put the choice in the hands of the researcher to discover research information efficiently.