China HowNet, founded in 1999, is the largest literature database in China. Behind China HowNet is a huge national project. Simply put, it is to build a large platform that can cover most of a country's knowledge resources, big warehouse (China Knowledge Resource Bank). We can intuitively understand it as a knowledge base or supermarket, where everyone saves their own research results and then finds the research results of others they want.
How did HowNet come from?
A huge project like HowNet can't be built in one day.
As early as 1995, China Academic Journal (CD Edition) (CAJ-CD) was formally established, and the first batch of finished products were published on1996+10.30. This project can be regarded as the predecessor of China Knowledge Infrastructure Project (hereinafter referred to as CNKI). On February 24th, 65438, Tsinghua University held the "Launching Ceremony of China Academic Journals (CD-ROM Edition) and the Inaugural Meeting of China Academic Journals' Literature Retrieval Consultation Station", and the prototype of CNKI was formally presented to the world in the form of CD-ROM. In the years before 1999, the mainstream of the digitalization of knowledge resources in China has been CD-ROM, which can also be called the CD-ROM era of CNKI. 1998, China Journal Network initiated by Tsinghua University and Tsinghua Tongfang started its online service, which is the predecessor of today's HowNet. In addition to these two institutions, there are also strong support from the Ministry of Education, Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China, Ministry of Science and Technology, General Administration of Press and Publication, National Copyright Administration and National Development and Reform Commission. 200 1 With the breakthrough of mirror station technology and the rapid increase of domestic Internet bandwidth, CNKI accelerates from CD to network. By 2003, China Periodical Network has developed into a knowledge service website integrating periodicals, newspapers, doctoral dissertations, conference papers, books, yearbooks and multimedia teaching materials. That is, in this year, China Journal Network became "China HowNet", and the familiar China HowNet was officially launched.
Today, China HowNet has developed into a giant, which not only has a huge amount of Chinese literature, but also includes databases of top universities such as Cambridge University and Oxford University, as well as scientific and technological databases of the United States, South Korea and France, and has become an international knowledge resource platform. In addition, the functions of digital publishing platform since the 11th Five-Year Plan and evaluation function after 20 10 are gradually improving. Not only is it filling the "China Knowledge Resource Database", but the significance of building a "knowledge-based project" is becoming more and more obvious.
What's in HowNet?
HowNet, a website relying on China's knowledge resource database, is full of documents. What can we find in it?
First, some important periodical documents. This is also the old job of HowNet. HowNet has cooperated with many journals, most of which have been included since 1994, and some can be traced back to the first issue. Today, there are still many journals joining the HowNet army.
Another important part is the master's thesis. Master students and doctoral students in many schools have to submit a copy to the library when defending their thesis. If the school cooperates with HowNet, these papers can be uploaded to the database of HowNet and searched on HowNet.
This is also the basic reason why someone asked us if we could find Zhai Tianlin's paper on HowNet. Master's or doctoral theses of some celebrities can also be found on HowNet. For example, "Lv Xiucai" Yu Entai and crosstalk performer Feng Gong.
There are also some important newspapers, such as People's Daily and Guangming Daily. Some of the above articles will also be included in HowNet, and the update frequency is extremely high. Many of them have reached daily observation, which is basically synchronized with the publication of newspapers.
What can HowNet do?
According to HowNet official website, its database only contains China academic journals (online edition), and at present it has included more than 8,000 domestic academic journals published since 19 15, among which there are many exclusive journal resources. Therefore, with rich academic resources, HowNet has become an essential tool for many teachers and students to write papers.
HowNet has a large number of periodical documents, publications and databases, which really facilitates people's search for related topics. But for most students, this is just a tool, not a source of data. In other words, in most cases, HowNet does not create resources, but is only a porter of knowledge resources.
Before HowNet, a large-scale knowledge resource platform, appeared, people also had other ways to query what they needed. It can be a lot of reading and accumulation, you can ask your tutor or classmates for help, and you can also follow the map through some high-quality academic research and what they quote.
There are also some special majors, such as literature, history and philosophy, which often involve reading first-hand materials such as original books, bamboo slips and silk books, or the research results of the ancients, which require photocopying materials, biopharmaceuticals, etc., and often require reading many foreign cutting-edge research results. These are also the places where the current knowledge network is not enough. Therefore, not only can you write a paper without HowNet, but you often can't rely entirely on HowNet.
How to use hownet?
Hownet contains so much content, but it is not free to read. However, due to its "big and comprehensive" advantage in academic resources, all university libraries are basically customers of HowNet.
For individual users, HowNet adopts two standards: charging by article and charging by page. For paper download pages, each page is charged at 7.5 yuan -25 yuan/page, while each page is charged at around 1 yuan/page. In other words, 100 yuan can only buy a few dozens of papers.
For group customers such as universities or libraries, HowNet adopts the way of annual subscription. Taking Shandong University as an example, China Government Procurement Network showed that the procurement project of Chinese database of China Knowledge Network was completed on 20 17 February 2 1 day, and the final transaction amount was1179,000 yuan. Divided equally, the cost of downloading HowNet papers by teachers and students in the whole school is more than 3200 yuan a day. In fact, before 20 16, many universities in Shandong, Yunnan, Hubei and other places stopped using HowNet because of the high update price of HowNet database. June 20 16, Wuhan University of Technology issued a notice to stop using HowNet. According to the information in the library of Wuhan University of Technology, since 2000, CNKI's quotation for this school has been increasing at a rate of more than 10% every year, ranging from 20 10 to 20 132.86. Even Peking University issued a notice on 20 16, saying that "the price of HowNet database is too high, and the service may be interrupted at any time".
The "sky-high" fee download service has also created the "high interest rate" of HowNet. According to the financial report released by Tongfang Co., Ltd., the annual revenue of Tongfang Wang Zhi in 20 17 reached 972 million yuan, with a gross profit margin of 61.23%; In 20 18 years, the half-year revenue exceeded 500 million yuan.