Summary
Explore this dynamic interactive to learn the basic principles of how this revolutionary tool works and the many ways in which scientists are using it in their research.
Category Archives: Botany
Encyclopedia of Life — now 10 years old!
The Encyclopedia of Life is 10 years old! It is freely available on the web. From their statistics, as of May 11, 2017, they have 5.5 million pages. Responsibilities are shared by interested groups and individuals. “The founding partners of the project include the Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, the Marine Biological Laboratory, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The Missouri Botanical Garden later joined, and negotiations are ongoing with the Atlas of Living Australia. Other partners are the American Museum of Natural History (New York), Natural History Museum (London), New York Botanical Garden, and the Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew).”
From https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Scientists_to_bring_all_species_together_in_Encyclopedia_of_Life
There is also a Wikipedia article about the EOL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_Life
Efforts began with plants, animals and fungi. It appears now that microorganisms have been added, as they’d hoped. If one searches for tuberculosis, there are many hits, but many are not very productive. Searching on the Genus is the key – Mycobacterium. The site provides the NCBI ( National Center for Biotechnology Information) taxonomy for these organisms. There are many entries on Staphylococcus species. Not all hits will be productive, and they urge inquirers to request information.
There are tabs for: Overview, Detail, Data, Media (including some videos), Maps, Names, Communities (which include related EOL groups, e.g. “Birds of America”), Collections (on-line databases), Resources, Literature and Updates. These headings also serve as filters or limits.
I tried cardinal, but Cardinalis cardinalis — the scientific name, Genus and species — works best, if you are looking for our most common red bird.
There are data which indicate species to species interactions, from this site: http://www.globalbioticinteractions.org/ There are many links to many collections.
I looked up cedar and from starting to browse through <6400 entries, I soon (within the first page of 25) came upon Cedrus libani, and found much information, including a video about the restoration of the “Cedars of Lebanon”. The page steers one to many “traits” including the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) status, which is “vulnerable” for this tree: Its populations are declining. Searching can be a bit tricky. Scientific name works best.
MEDLINE ANNUAL CHANGES/UPDATES
This article collects the notable data changes made to MEDLINE during annual National Library of Medicine (NLM) maintenance known as Year-End Processing (YEP) for 2016:
MEDLINE Data Changes — 2016
Tybaert S. NLM Tech Bull. 2015 Nov-Dec;(407):e8.
2015 December 08 [posted]
- MeSH Vocabulary Updated for 2016
- Updated MeSH in MEDLINE Citations
- New MeSH Headings
- Changes to MeSH Headings
- Brand New Concepts
- Changes of particular interest
- MeSH Publication Types
- MeSH Qualifier (Subheading) Deletion
- MeSH Tree Changes
- MeSH Annotation Projects
- Other Changes: One Concept Split into Two
- Entry Combination Revisions
- Structured Abstracts
- OLDMEDLINE MeSH Mapping
- MEDLINE Journal Title Updates
- MEDLINE Country of Publication
- PubMed Notes
Brand new concepts include: Autism Spectrum Disorder, Human Embryonic Stem Cells, Olive Oil, Origin of Life, Open Access Publishing, War-Related Injuries, RNAi Therapeutics, and many more terms. Medline thesaurus terms are remapped when changes occur, so as to include articles under former headings.
Virtual Cell Animation Collection
This website is hosted by North Dakota State University, the Molecular & Cellular Biology Learning Center:
http://vcell.ndsu.nodak.edu/animations
There are 6 videos on molecular processes, 9 on cellular processes and 9 on cellular energy conversions. There is also an overview video. Sponsors include the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Dept. of Education.
Source: Choice, Sept. 2015, p. 34, listing of “Outstanding Academic Websites of 2014”
Directory of Open Access Journals — DOAJ
This directory of OA journals is hosted by Lund University Libraries in Sweden. From their homepage: http://www.doaj.org:
“DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.” One can search by keywords or browse through broader and narrower subject headings.
These stats are from their website, accessed Sept. 28, 2015:
Seen in “Outstanding Websites of 2014”, Choice, Sept. 2015, p. 33
ProQuest full text of scholarly journal content soon indexed by Google Scholar
By Kurt Sanford, CEO
“ProQuest is enabling the full text of its scholarly journal content to be indexed in Google Scholar, improving discovery and research outcomes. Our goal is that by the third quarter of 2015, users starting their research in Google Scholar will be able to access full text via ProQuest.”
http://www.proquest.com/blog/pqblog/2015/Why-ProQuest-is-working-with-Google.html
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Tuesday, 18th August 2015 ProQuest Scholarly Content Now Discoverable in Google Scholar From No Shelf Required:
Source via: ResourceShelf Newsletter – 8th September 2015 [ResourceShelf] Newsletter 643 |
BioOne — adding 7 titles, but after 12/2015 ceasing to contain Entomological Soc. of Am. & Am. Soc. of Mammalogists publications
” BioOne adds seven new journals to BioOne Complete – 04 Sep 2015
BioOne, a nonprofit publisher that aims to make scientific research more accessible, has added seven new journals to BioOne Complete, its online aggregation of independently-published, subscribed and open-access titles.
Joining the subscribed aggregation in January 2016 will be: Caribbean Journal of Science, published by the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez; Journal of Entomological Science, published by the Georgia Entomological Society; Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society, published by The Lepidopterists’ Society; and Systematic and Applied Acarology, published by the Systematic and Applied Acarology Society (UK). Joining BioOne Complete as open-access participants will be: Paleontological Contributions, published by The Paleontological Institute at The University of Kansas; and Palaeodiversity and Stuttgarter Beiträge zur Naturkunde A, both published by The Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History, Germany.
These titles represent a wealth of content in biodiversity conservation, entomology, paleontology, and natural history. Their collective backfile encompasses 48 years and over 12,000 new pages for BioOne Complete. In 2016, the aggregation will be home to 191 publications (130 current, 43 backfile-only, and 18 open-access titles), comprising over 1.2 million pages and growing daily. 78% of BioOne Complete’s subscribed titles are ranked in Thomson Reuters’ Journal Citation Reports, and 25% are based outside of the US. Furthermore, 73% of current titles are available in full-text XML exclusively through BioOne Complete.
Just as these new additions enhance a subscription to BioOne Complete, BioOne participation represents a key step forward for each of these nonprofit publishers to make their content more accessible to a global audience.
As of December 31, 2015, the publications of the Entomological Society of America and the American Society of Mammalogists will cease adding new content to BioOne Complete. In accordance with BioOne’s commitment to perpetual access, all previously deposited issues from 2000-2015 (sixteen years of content), will remain accessible to BioOne Complete subscribers in perpetuity.”
Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter, 9/4/2015
The Plant List
- http://www.theplantlist.org/
“As the website rather modestly states, The Plant List is “a working list of all known plant species.” In other words, botanically inspired readers will find on this site basic information about 1,293,685 (and counting) different plants. Readers may like to begin with How to use this site, a comprehensive section that describes how to search The Plant List, when it is useful or not useful to conduct a search, when it is more helpful to browse, and other tips and tidbits. After getting their bearings, readers may then want to delve into the list itself. For instance, the Browse tab allows readers to look into the four major groups (flowering plants, conifers, ferns, and mosses), and then dig down into family, genera, and species. For science teachers looking for new resources to offer their students, or for anyone fascinated by plants, this collaboration between the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, and the Missouri Botanical Garden is a truly comprehensive resource. [CNH]”
- Source: The Scout Report — Volume 21, Number 32 (HTML), Aug. 21, 2015