CrossSearch searches multiple indexes simultaneously

Back at my desk. So much for the travel log - seems I escaped the Internet ;-).



Web of Knowledge (which includes Web of Science) has responded to the Scopus innovations with similar features of its own.
One of these is CrossSearch. If you select it (in the green bar in Web of Science or Web of Knowledge) it simultaneously searches all the indexes shown below. This would provide some good coverage of certain engineering and biology fields.

Web of Science; Inspec; AIAA Meeting Papers American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics; Agricola; arXiv Computer Science; arXiv Mathematics; All arXiv ePrint Archives; arXiv Nonlinear Sciences; arXiv Physics; arXiv Quantitative Biology; Civil Engineering Database; The Educator's Reference Desk ERIC Database; NTIS Library Documents published since 1990; NASA Astrophysics Data System; Popline Reproductive Health Literature; PubMed.

You could find and search most of these databases independently on the Internet but it's quite nice to be able to do them all together in one search, plus the links to full text via WMU subscriptions are enabled.

International News

Written from England, Saturday July 1: The whole of England is poised on the edge of the quarter-final world cup football (soccer in US-speak) match against Portugal at 4pm local time today.

Pubs, shops, cars, houses bedecked in the England (red cross on white) flag and the news media full of it all.

To get a taste of it do a Google search but for informed commentary click on the By Type or Format link on the library home page, select news and current events and link to international news in a databases such as LexisNexis Academic.

I'd send you the links and even a picture if I had a better computer link up but hope you'll check it out anyway.

Scopus - interdisciplinary science and citation index

For those in science and technology, Scopus offers similar information as the more familiar Web of Science (what used to be Science Citation Index and is now part of Web of Knowledge).

Scopus claims it is 'the largest abstract and citation database of research literature and quality web sources.' Where Web of Science restricts inclusion in its database to the most cited journals, Scopus is more inclusive and only demands that journals are peer-reviewed. Scopus claims to provide better coverage of publications from all geographic regions, including non-English titles as long as English abstracts are included.

Scopus also provides a citation tracker that allows you easily to find and check citations Click here for a demonstration.

For more about Scopus check out their FAQs.

Journal Citation Reports & BioMed Central

The 2005 Journal Citation Reports (JCR) data are now available. So if you looked at Journal Citation Reports when I made the previous post look again now for the most recent data.

Among the journals that will be tracked for JCR are several open access journals. In a press release, Monday June 12, BioMed Central* announced that in the last six months eleven (11) open access journals published by BioMed Central have been accepted for citation tracking and inclusion in Web of Science.

These are:
BMC Biology
BMC Developmental Biology
BMC Immunology
BMC Neurology
BMC Plant Biology
BMC Structural Biology
Health and Quality of Life Outcomes
Microbial Cell Factories
Molecular Cancer
Nutrition and Metabolism
Retrovirology

37 journals in BioMed Central's portfolio now have an official Impact Factor, or will receive one within the next three years.
For more about these titles and the process of gaining an official impact factor score see http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/faq?name=impactfactor

*BioMed Central is an independent online publishing house committed to providing open access to peer-reviewed research.

Journal Citation Reports

I'm very pleased to be able to announce that the library now has a subscription to Journal Citation Reports.

This database allows you to evaluate which journals in your field are the most influential and also the most appropriate for the type of information you want to publish. It provides these comparative data by research field and journal title:

• impact factor - how heavily articles are cited
• immediacy - length of time it takes for articles to become cited, and
• cited half-life - length of time articles continue to be cited ( Yes, that is half-life as in exponential decay).

Take a look. There's even short explanatory online training clips.
It's interesting and useful and it sure beats the microfiche reports that we've persevered with up to now.

RefWorks citation management software

Do you hate formatting bibliographies? Do you have to sift through masses of notes and files to find elusive references? Did you never really take to EndNote?

You should check out RefWorks.

RefWorks is a web-based, user-friendly citation management system that WMU makes available free to you. If you want to be able to build, manage, annotate, search and cite from your own set of personal references it's great.

• Build a personal searchable database of useful references
• Import citations directly from your preferred indexes
• Add your own searchable notes and keywords
• Input citations into documents while you write
• Format references to the writing style you need
• Reformat manuscripts easily
• Use your personal RefWorks database from any computer with Internet access

RefWorks is available via the A-Z list on the library Home page. There's a tutorial available in RefWorks under Help plus useful searchable help pages. For additional assistance please e-mail me.

SciFinder Scholar (Chemistry) desktop online training

Register now for CAS live interactive desktop seminars at http://casevents.webex.com

To register input SFSHK72 for SciFinder ID

SciFinder®: Exploring a Wealth of Diverse Content from CAS

Thursday, June 8, 2006 at 9pm-10pm EDT

Tuesday, June 20 at 9-10 am EDT or
Wednesday, June 28 at 9.00-10am EDT

Learn about:

• CAS indexing for journal and patent documents
• Broad indexing categories like “Preparation” that allow you to focus a search
• How chemistry information is integrated within SciFinder so that it’s easy to find
• Case studies
• SciFinder's coverage of other scientific disciplines

Have you remembered to sign up for the Web of Science & Biosis Web-based Training in June?

You could win an iPod! - I'm hoping to.