Thursday, November 17, 2011

Google Scholar Citations

Today, Google publicly launched its Google Scholar Citations service.  Although the service has been available for beta testers for the past few months, today is the first day that people in the general public (like me) have been able to create a profile and start adding publications (see image below!).

According to a post to the Google Scholar blog earlier today, authors will be able to easily add their publications, and then track the impact of their citations over time.  From the image below, you can see that My Citations will calculate the total cites a person has had, an author's h-index, and an author's i10 -index.

I have discussed impact factors and other types of citation metrics on this blog before (and with many of you in person), and I think that this new tool developed by Google has a lot of potential for helping researchers, scholars, and faculty members track their scholarly impact.  We'll have to see how it evolves, but I for one am excited about this tool, and encourage you to check it out!

Friday, November 11, 2011

Tools & Strategies for Managing Your Research

Earlier this week, a library colleague (Heather Moorefield-Lang), and I presented an FDI (Faculty Development Institute) session entitled Tools and Strategies for Managing Your Research.  We had a great turnout, and an even better discussion during the session!

I've written here about various tools for organization, task management, research management, and so forth, but I thought I'd share the slides from this particular session.

If you like what you see, then try to attend our encore session, which we will present on March 26, 2012.  Yes, that's a bit far out, but if you schedule it now, then you'll definitely be able to attend!  You can read more about FDI and see a calendar of upcoming sessions here:  http://www.fdi.vt.edu/.

If you don't want to view te entire presentation (below), then click here to view the brief handout (with all essential links) that we developed for the session!

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Office Hours Today: Canceled

Unfortunately, I find myself once again in the position of having to cancel Wallace Hall Office Hours for Tuesday, November 8, from 2-3:30 p.m.

I will be at my office hours tomorrow, Wednesday, November 9, from 9-10:30 a.m.  So, those of you who have already scheduled meetings with me during that time need not worry--I will be there.

As always, simply contact me if you would like to set up a time to meet, one-on-one.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

New Books: October 2011

We've acquired quite a few new, interesting books over the past month!  As usual, I've selected a few to showcase here that I think you may be particularly interested in.  If you'd like to view the entire list, simply go here.  Remember, you can request an item if you don't see it on the new books list, but would like to!

And, as always, all the books below are available for check out--until someone else checks them out, of course! Simply click on the title to view the Addison record, call number, and location for each book.



The Psychology of Eating and Drinking

Read a brief summary!









New Life Sciences e-book series from ScienceDirect









Global Development of Organic Agriculture

Read a brief summary!




How to Write and Illustrate Scientific Papers

Read a brief summary!

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Royal Society & Scientific American Historical Archives Available!

The digital age has made many things possible that we never even dreamed of!  Because of new technologies, we are able to turn the pages of books at the British Library and use our iPads to browse unique collections at the New York Public Library.  Now, thanks to nature.com's new offerings, we are able to view Isaac Newton's first published scientific paper, Charles Darwin's early work, and Benjamin Franklin's firsthand account of his kite experiment, among other similar treasures.

Last week, the Royal Society announced that its historical journal archive (which includes the FIRST EVER peer-reviewed journal) is now permanently available online.  For FREE.  You can read the original press release here.  The archives opened yesterday, November 1, which means that you can now browse this treasure trove of history and knowledge.  The press release notes that the announcement was made to coincide with Open Access Week, an initiative that I blogged a bit about last year.

Image from The Royal Society

Furthermore, through the end of November, you can also access the Scientific American historical archive, which goes back as far as 1845.  Starting at the beginning of December, that content will only be available if an institution has purchased a site license for it, but you can browse it now, for free.  Access the archives here:  http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/archive/index.html.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

National Library of Medicine Apps Winners!

Recently, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) hosted a contest for library app development--"Show Off Your Apps:  Innovative Uses of NLM Information."  Five winners, and several honorable mentions, were selected, and you can read about these projects in the NLM press release.  While some of these, like the iAnatomy app, are true apps and available in the App Store, some, like GLAD4U, are more like interactive websites.  Check them all out, and see how they might help you!  


Descriptions of the five winners are as follows.  Descriptions are from the NLM press release:


GLAD4U

GLAD4U (Gene List Automatically Derived For You) is a new, free web-based gene retrieval and prioritization tool, which takes advantage of the NCBI’s Entrez Programming Utilities (E-utilities). Upon the submission of a query, GLAD4U retrieves the corresponding publications with eSearch before using Pubmed ID-Entrez Gene ID mapping tables provided by the NCBI to create a list of genes. A statistics-based prioritization algorithm ranks those genes into a list that is output to the user, usually within less than a minute. The GLAD4U user interface accepts any valid queries for PubMed, and its output page displays the ranked gene list and information associated with each gene, chronologically-ordered supporting publications, along with a summary of the run and links for file exports and for further functional enrichment analyses.

iAnatomy

Learning anatomy interactively with a touchscreen device is  dynamic and engaging. Having it as an app, makes the information available anywhere, anytime. iAnatomy is an exciting electronic anatomy atlas for iPhone/iPod touch. The images are interactive and zoomable. If a label is touched, the name of the structure is shown.  Images span from the face to the pelvis. The face and neck images and the female pelvis images are reconstructed from data from the National Library of Medicine's Visible Human Project. iAnatomy is designed to stand on its own and does not require an ongoing internet connection. Learning is reinforced with multiple quiz modes. Latin medical terminology is also included as an option for international use.

KNALIJ

The KNALIJ web application addresses the challenges and opportunities posed by ‘big data’ with a new generation of information visualization tools. It offers researchers, students and health consumers alike a technology platform with capabilities to rapidly discover and gain insights from the copious amounts of information being made available from the National Libraries of Medicine (NLM), through its data repositories such as PubMed. KNALIJ recognizes the ‘connections’ linking bio-medical and life sciences research and researchers around the world, and visualizes those linkages. This makes them clear, intuitive, and even playful by providing interactive ‘information communities’ for exploration, analysis, and education.

NLMplus

NLMplus is an innovative semantic search and discovery application developed by WebLib LLC, a small business in Maryland. NLMplus provides enhanced access to the vast collection of health and biomedical information and services made available by the world's largest medical library, the National Library of Medicine (NLM).

Quertle

Quertle is an innovative website for searching and investigating the biomedical literature. Quertle uses advanced linguistic methods to find the most relevant documents instead of traditional keyword searching, which often returns an overwhelming list of uninformative articles. Quertle is geared to active life science professionals - both researchers and health care providers - and saves them considerable time and effort in finding the literature they need.  Quertle, available on the web using any browser, simultaneously searches multiple sources of life science literature, including MEDLINE.