Biology Library Blog

All,
The Web of Knowledge interface has been revamped and the old version is no longer available. Use the tutorials below to get used to the new interface as the new semester begins, all of these databases are affected by this change:

New Interface Tutorials:
General WOK: http://scientific.thomson.com/support/recorded-training/wok/
Web Of Science: http://scientific.thomson.com/support/recorded-training/wos/
BIOSIS:
http://scientific.thomson.com/support/recorded-training/biosis/
Medline: http://scientific.thomson.com/support/recorded-training/medline/
Zoological Record: http://scientific.thomson.com/support/recorded-training/zr/

Please let me know if you have any questions about this change.

Explore and Enjoy,

Steve

Most of us have a particular path that we follow when we’re doing research. We have our favorite databases, journals, books, and other resources that have helped us get what we’ve needed in the past. Then, along comes a new tool that changes the way we do things.

The Google search engine has changed the research habits of many a scholar in the past few years. To many, this is old news, but Google now has a specialized interface for searching the journal literature called Google Scholar that provides direct links to peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Although it is not as standardized, thorough, or reliable as BIOSIS, Web of Science and other scholarly literature databases, Google Scholar has a simple interface that appeals to many.

Google Scholar Feature Highlights:

• Citation Tracking
• FindIt@PUL Option
• RefWorks Export Option

For More Information on Google Scholar:

• Google Scholar Help
• Google Scholar Advanced Search
• Advanced Search Tips

Explore and Enjoy,

Steve

BioOne is a collaboration between scientific societies, libraries, academe and the private sector that seeks to make high-impact bioscience research journals more accessible. Most of BioOne’s titles are published by small societies and other not-for-profit organizational publishers, and, until now, have been available only in printed form.

Princeton University Library has recently purchased the BioOne.2 Collection in an effort to continue to increase the size of our electronic journal holdings. Click on these links to browse the titles in the BioOne.1 Collection, which we have had access to since 2001, and our new BioOne.2 Collection.

Explore and Enjoy,

Steven M. Adams

Now and then we all need to quick answers to scientific questions. AccessScience is an excellent resource for many of your scientific fact finding missions. AccessScience Features:

• Over 8,500 online articles the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology 10th edition
• Research Updates from the McGraw-Hill Yearbooks of Science & Technology
• 110,000+ definitions from the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms
• 15,000 illustrations and graphics, and bibliographies containing more than 28,000 literature citations
• Content contributed by more than 5000 researchers, including 36 Nobel Prize winners
• Biographies of more than 2,000 well-known scientists from the Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific Biography®
• The latest news in science and technology from Science News® and ScienCentral® videos
• Continuously updated, fully-searchable, media-rich content, terms, images and videos

The site was recently updated, the videos and images are probably the best improvement to the site. Click Here to see a video news report about “bomb sniffing yeast” that is featured in AccessScience.

Explore and Enjoy,
Steve

Princeton University Library now subscribes to CSA Illustrata: Natural Sciences (1997-Present), a new kind of tool for finding scholarly literature in the biological, environmental, and aquatic sciences. CSA Illustrata is unique in that it makes the images, tables, graphs, and figures in over 880 journals fully searchable. Each article’s images are indexed individually and displayed in the database with the source article’s abstract and bibliographic data. This “deep indexing” technique makes images more accessible for scholars who need to do a through literature search. Try this database at your leisure and send me your feedback via the comment form below.

Also, watch this video for a more in depth explanation of the concept; it features our own Sam Flaxman from the Levin Lab in EEB and Maria Prokopenko from Princeton’s Geosciences department.

Explore and Enjoy,

Steve

Princeton University Library recently purchased the backfiles of The Lancet, one of the top international medical journals. This full-text searchable backfile begins with the first issue in 1823, offering over 180 years of excellent coverage of advances in health and medicine. In this time span you will find the best and the worst in the history of medical practice.

For those of you interested in the current issues, keep in mind that The Lancet also provides a convenient RSS Feed of the new articles in each week’s issue, Click Here to subscribe. This is also available for hundreds of other Elsevier journals, click here to read more about Elsevier RSS Feeds

Explore and Enjoy,

Steve

Princeton University now has access to Scopus, an interdisciplinary science literature database that provides abstracts, citation data, rss feeds and more. Scopus provides citation data for it’s contents, similar to the Web of Science Database. It is best for more recent literature (1996 to Present) and patent searching.

Take a guided tour through Scopus by clicking here.

Explore and Enjoy,

Steve

The Nature Publishing Group, in partnership with the British Library and the Wellcome Trust, has introduced Nature Precedings, a new way for scholars to distribute their preliminary findings. Here is an excerpt from their description of the site:

“Nature Precedings is a place for researchers to share documents, including presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and manuscripts. It provides a rapid way to disseminate emerging results and new theories, solicit opinions, and record the provenance of ideas. It also makes such material easy to archive, share and cite. The whole service is free of charge.”

Explore and Enjoy,

Steve

The Encyclopedia of Life Project is an ambitious effort to build an online reference source and database for the world’s 1.8 million named and known species, and to facilitate the discovery of those yet unknown. Concieved by Edward O. Wilson, the project is backed by a robust amalgam of organizations, including The MacArthur Foundation, The Field Museum, Harvard University, The Marine Biological Laboratory, The Smithsonian, and The Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Watch the videos below. The first is a an entertaining montage explaining and demonstrating the concept, the second is Edward O. Wilson’s TED Prize acceptance speech where he shares his wish for this project.

Watch and Enjoy,

I am certain that many of you have heard the buzz about the Open Access (OA) Movement. Many of you have published in or or even sit on the boards of such journals, others of you are waiting to see if this is just a passing fad. The video below is an interview with Sydney Verba, Director of Harvard University Libraries and professor of political science, and Charles Nesson, Professor of Law at Harvard. They discuss issues related to open access.

Here at Princeton, we clearly face the same issues as Harvard regarding the crisis in scholarly communication. If you have strong opinions or significant experiences you would like to share dealing with publishing (or not publishing) in open access journals, please click on the comments link below and discuss them.

Explore and Enjoy,

Steve