Biology Library Blog

We now have full access to CSH Protocols, a database of new and classic research techniques that is fully searchable by keyword and browsable subject. Protocols are regularly expanded, updated, and annotated by authors and users of the techniques.

Keep in mind that you can post a CSH Protocols hyperlink on your BlackBoard or E-Reserves sites to support the courses you teach, or even on your lab’s website.

The library currently subscribes to three other major method/protocol databases:

Wiley’s Current Protocols in Molecular Biology

Wiley’s Current Protocols in Bioinformatics

Humana’s BioMedProtocols.com

For a full list of Biological and Life Sciences Databases go to:

http://library.princeton.edu/catalogs/articles.php?subjectID=11

Explore and Enjoy,

Steve

Aquatic Sciences & Fisheries Abstracts (ASFA) is a database covering the world’s literature on the science, technology, management, and conservation of marine, brackish water, and freshwater resources and environments, including their socio-economic and legal aspects. ASFA provides regularly updated abstracts to 5,000 serial publications, books, reports, conference proceedings, translations and limited distribution literature.

Here is a list of other databases that are good for these subject areas:

BIOSIS Previews: Biological Abstracts

Web of Science (ISI)

Zoological Record

For a full list of the Biological and Life Sciences Databases go to:

http://library.princeton.edu/catalogs/articles.php?subjectID=11

If you are doing historical research in the sciences, PUL has two new acquisitions that will be of great benefit:

BIOSIS Previews/Biological Abstracts Archive: 1926-1968

The BIOSIS Archive delivers all the bibliographic records from 49 Biological Abstracts print volumes 1926 to 1968. It consists of 1.8 million records relevant to working biologists, from journals, patents, conference reports and books, and in fully indexed and searchable form. With more than 15 million records, Biosis is the most comprehensive index of journals, meetings, conferences, and symposia in the life sciences ranging from 1926 to the present. Although this is not a full-text article database, our PULinks system conveniently links you to the full-text

Also, we now subscribe to BIOSIS via the Web of Knowledge Platform. This change enables researches to link directly to the cited reference data in Web of Science.

Web of Science Historic Backfiles: 1900-1944

The ISI Century of Science Project made available more than 850,000 of the most influential, important and useful articles from 262 scientific journals from 1900 - 1944. This adds 44 years on to the already robust Web of Science database. Navigate backward in time using the Cited References feature to uncover the research that influenced an author’s work. Navigate forward in time using the Times Cited feature to discover the impact a paper or other published item has had on current research.

For a full list of the Biological and Life Sciences Databases go to:

http://library.princeton.edu/catalogs/articles.php?subjectID=11

Whether you are writing a senior thesis, a dissertation, or your latest scholarly publication, this new version of an old resource may just come in handy. We now subscribe to the Chicago Manual of Style at this URL: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/contents.html.

This reference is normallly tethered to the reference section of the library; now it is fully available online 24/7/365.

For those who do not use EndNote or RefWorks to format your bibliographies (or those who want to confirm a rule) chapters 16 and 17 of this manual provide excellent instruction on fomatting the old fashioned way. This resource provides all you need to insure that you are writing, citing, and publishing by the rules, for this style at least. For other styles (MLA, APA, CBE, etc.), please visit the library’s Citing Sources page at http://library.princeton.edu/help/citing.php

Explore and Enjoy,

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

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

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

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

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