Biology Library Blog

The increasing interdisciplinarity of scientific research may require that you use unfamiliar research tools now and then. When BIOSIS, PubMed and Web Of Science don’t meet your needs, Princeton University Library has a wealth of other resources to support research that crosses disciplinary boundaries. In this post, I will give an overview of resources in neuroscience and psychology that scholars in MolBio or EEB may find useful.

PsycINFO (1800’s+) is the most comprehensive index of the scholarly literature in the behavioral sciences; but don’t overlook PsycARTICLES, which offers the full-text of 48 American Psychological Association journals from 1988 to the present; PsycBooks, which provides full-text PDF’s of scholarly titles published by APA Books; PsycEXTRA for gray literature and other information found outside traditional peer-reviewed publications; PsycCRITIQUES for book reviews; and NeuroSciNow, a robust collection of online books and journals by Humana Press. MIT CogNet is a collection of journals, books, reference works, OpenCourseWare (Free Syllabi, Lecture Notes, Podcasts, and more), and videos. If you want to keep track of neuroscience and psychology literature, Annual Review of Neuroscience and Annual Review of Psychology both provide excellent coverage.

Several major reference works in the behavioral sciences are now available online: The DSM-IV (via Psychiatry Online), Mental Measurements Yearbook (for vocational, educational, and psychological tests), The Encyclopedia of the Human Brain, The Encyclopedia of Neurological Sciences, and The Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Feel free to contact me if you need assistance with sources for your interdisciplinary research, whether in these fields or others. If you have specilized questions about literature searching in the behavioral sciences, Mary Chaikin, our phenomenal Psychology Librarian, will be more than willing to assist you with your query. The Psychology Library is located in Green Hall with the Psychology Department.

Explore and Enjoy,

Steven M. Adams
Biological and Life Sciences Librarian
(609) 258-5484
smadams@princeton.edu

Social Networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have received lots of press for capturing the attention of young people and changing the social landscape of college campuses and K-12 schools . Although a few scientists have MySpace and/or Facebook accounts, but many would be uncomfortable networking in these virtual environments due to their focus on students and youth culture.

Enter Nature Network, a virtual community (managed by Nature Publishing Group) that allows you to create and join blogs, social groups, and discussions centered on your scientific interests. Read the About The Network page for a detailed description of this initiative. The site is brand new and ripe for contribution.

Explore and Enjoy,

Steve

The University of Cambridge is sponsoring the Darwin Correspndence Project. Founded in 1974 by Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith, the initial goal of the project was to “locate, research and publish” Charles Darwin’s letters. The project later grew to include all letters written to Darwin, they have thus far located approximately 14,500 letters and new letters still being to be discovered. The letters range from 1821 to 1882 when Darwin died. This is an invaluable resource for scholars of history, evolution, genetics, and religion.

The project is celebrating the launch of their redesigned website, which features a full-text database of 5,000 letters written by and to Charles Darwin. Darwin’s correspondents include Emma Darwin (his cousin and wife), Robert Fitzroy (captain of the Beagle), and Alfred Russel Wallace (another evolution scholar). The site also contains a special section that deals Darwin’s religious beliefs, meant to provide clarity in the evolution vs. creation debate.

There are also two other websites for those interested in Darwin:The Darwin Digital Library, run by the American Museum of Natural History; and The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, another University of Cambridge project.

Explore and Enjoy,
Steve

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

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

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

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 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

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

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