Engineering & Mathematics Notebook

Sunday, 01 November 2009

Pubget: A handy tool for getting PDFs from PubMed

PubMed is the most prominent of the various interfaces for MedLine, the Biomedical literature database published by the National Library of Medicine.  It is an index, not a full-text database. It does provide links to selected full text of articles in PubMed Central and Tufts users can access a customized version that highlights and links to the full text of articles in journals to which we subscribe.  However, you usually have to make multiple clicks to retrieve an Acrobat PDF version of an article.

A work-around for this is a website called Pubget. Although ostensibly in beta mode, Pubget already is a pretty effective tool for grabbing PDFs right from a set of search results within the Pubget interface. By default, it only retrieves PDFs from open access journals but Tufts affiliates can use the “Activate an Institution” feature to access PDFs from journals to which the University subscribes.  The PDF appears in full Acrobat glory within the Pubget window and permits the usual Acrobat functions, such as printing, saving, and emailing the visible file.

Other handy features include a utility to download PDFs in bulk; the ability to download citations for use in bibliographic managers such as EndNote, RefWorks, and Zotero; and links to “related” papers, the original PubMed abstract, and the publisher’s website.  Setting up a personal account enables you to store favorites and get alerts.  An Advanced Search feature permits article screening by PubMed ID, MESH term, chemical, and other facets.

Posted in Research Tools

Tuesday, 13 October 2009

PubMed Rapid Research Notes (RRN)

PubMed recently introduced Rapid Research Notes (RRN), to provide “permanent access to research shared through online forums designed for immediate communication.” These notes will consist of collections focusing on key topics of current conern. At present, the collection consists of Currents Influenza, which are entries from the Public Library of Science (PLoS) on the current influenza pandemic, but more topics will be added. Potential Tufts SOE audiences for the current set include Biomedical Engineering and Public Health.

Posted in Research Tools

Monday, 12 October 2009

Journal of the Boston Society of Civil Engineers Partially Online

The Boston Society of Civil Engineers (BSCES), founded in 1848, is the oldest engineering society in the U.S. It became a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in 1974. Between 1914 and 1985, it published the Journal of the Boston Society of Civil Engineers, available in print in the Tisch Library Bound Periodicals shelves (since then, the BSCES publication has been entitled Civil Engineering Practice).

As part of a project to scan and digitize older issues of notable journals (a good protection against the trend of libraries going all digital), Tisch Library (under the sponsorship of the Boston
Library Consortium (BLC)) has digitized nine volumes of the Journal, those published between 1914 and 1922 and which are in the public domain. These are hosted online in the Internet Archive’s American Libraries website and are a treasure trove of civil engineering data, not only for historical analysis, but for engineers, landscape architects, urban planners, and others who are trying to understand the landscape and structures they’ve inherited in Boston and other parts of Massachusetts (although many articles cover other regions of the U.S. as well as abroad). Sample article titles focusing on topics close to home include Subway Construction at Old South Church, The South End Sewer System of Boston, and New England Power Transmission Lines.

The American Libraries collection contains other items of interest to engineers, including Robert Henry Thurston’s multi-volume Materials of Engineering (originally published c. 1888-92), The San Francisco earthquake and fire of April 18, 1906, and their effects on structures and structural materials, and Standard specifications for structural steel – timber – concrete and reinforced concrete (1911) as well as pamphlets, catalogs, handbooks, and various other forms of engineering “gray literature.”

Posted in Civil Engineering, Engineering, Engineering/Math History

Thursday, 08 October 2009

Visualizing The U.S. Electric Grid

As part of its special series, Power Hungry: Reinventing the U.S. Electric Grid, the NPR website features an interactive map of the U.S. Energy Grid, showing sources of power in separate layers by resource type (coal, nuclear, gas, etc.) as well as additional maps for power plants, solar power, and wind power.

Posted in Engineering, Green Industries

Tuesday, 06 October 2009

Why Golf Balls have Dimples

The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) has produced an online collection of podcasts. This contains presentations given at various MAA-related events, going back to 2007. Sample topics include The Mathematics of PageRank, Patterns in the Primes, and What Can We Say After We Say We’re Sorry? or, Adventures in Optimization.” The podcasts feature speakers from major research institutions. Some contain a related article, some which in turn may incldue videocasts, related podcasts, and links to other resources. Now we know why those little golf balls have dimples!

Note: The MAA is not the only professional mathematical association to get into the podcast act. The American Mathematical Society (AMS) offers podcasts as part of its Mathematical Moments program; these clips are downloadable for free from iTunes.

Posted in Mathematics

Tuesday, 22 September 2009

Collection Highlights for 2009

Over the past year, Miriam Allman, our fearless Engineering/ Mathematics/ Sciences Bibliographer and Collection Development Manager, has made important additions to the Tufts collections on engineering and mathematics.  Some highlights:

• Knovel: Our subscription for this collection of online technical manuals and references for engineers now includes subject sections for Earth Sciences and for Sustainable Energy & Development.  And, as reported a few weeks ago in this newsletter, Knovel enhanced its interface.
• SpringerLink: Our subscription for this comprehensive database of online scientific and books and journals now includes journal archives and books for Business & Economics, Computer Science, and Engineering.  The online book collection begins with 1996 and the journals go back to their initial date of publication.
• Reaxys: Reaxys is an online source of information on organic, inorganic and organometallic compounds. It is based on the combined content of CrossFire Beilstein, CrossFire Gmelin, and Patent Chemistry Database (PCD) as well as additional pharmacological, ecological and toxicological data. Searches can be done on substances, reactions, and citations as well as by drawing chemical structures.
• Standard Methods for the Examination of Water and Wastewater: Published jointly by American Public Health Association, American Water Works Association, Water Environment Federation, this collection presents analytical techniques for the determination of water quality developed by the Standard Methods Committee (SMC).
• In the Human Factors realm, online subscriptions have been launched for two important journals: Human Factors, from the Human Factors Society, and Ergonomics, the official publication of the Ergonomics Research Society.
• Institute of Civil Engineers (ICE) Virtual Library: This is an online journal archive covering every major civil engineering discipline and includes high quality journals such as Géotechnique and ICE Proceedings.
• National Research Council (NRC) of Canada: Subscriptions have been activated to various NRC journals, including to the Canadian Geotechnical Journal (Revue canadienne de géotechnique), the Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering (Revue canadienne de génie civil), and the Canadian journal of earth sciences (Revue canadienne des sciences de la Terre). Other NRC journals have also been added to the collection.
• The print collection has been expanded to include, among other items, resources are on the increasingly popular open software for statistics, R. Such titles include Data Manipulation with R, Robust Statistical Methods with R, and Statistical Computing with R.

Posted in Collections News

Monday, 21 September 2009

New Engineering & Math Titles from the DOAJ

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is an expanding collection of open access journals covering all disciplines. The DOAJ’s stated goal is to “increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals thereby promoting their increased usage and impact.” It provides a “one stop shop” for over 4,300 journals that have a peer review process or other quality control system that may guarantee a certain quality of content. As the result of its efforts, the DOAJ recently received the 2009 Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications from SPARC Europe, the change advocate for scholarly communications.

The DOAJ collection currently offers over 420 journals in various disciplines in technology and engineering and over 170 in mathematics and statistics. It is particularly useful for titles from small publishers, individual institutes, and countries in which English is the official language (although most articles are in translated).

Where DOAJ is somewhat weak is in its own search interface, which is limited compared to what more sophisticated index databases such as ISI Web of Science, Scopus, and CSA offer (a situation which prevents one from finding, for example, how many authors have a Tufts affiliation). Still, its search engine offers sufficient options to help unearth some research gems and a number of of DOAJ titles are listed in PubMed Central, Scopus, and other indexing services .

Posted in Journal Watch

Sunday, 20 September 2009

Trend Watch: Nano

In recent years, a BIG research topic has been about things very small – nano-sized to be exact. Nano-technology and nano-science have been high on the radar of engineers, scientists, and STEM librarians. Consequently, when Tufts released its new Engineering Research Guides this fall, we devoted a page to nanotechnology.

The usual criteria for anything nano is that one dimension must be between .1 to 100 nanometers (one billionth of a meter) – a fraction of a single hair. Consequently, many applications involve very slender, often invisible (to the human eye) applications. Applications for nano involve all the STEM disciplines, from specialty coatings and miniature sensors to nano-membranes for water purification.

Some debate exists as whether all of the so-called nano-applications are really new or simply being repurposed to excite interest. But there is no doubt that nano is considered to be enough of its own discipline to warrant its own Library of Congress subject heading. Apart from reference books on the topic, a growing number of journal collections publish titles dedicated to nano. The American Chemical Society, IEE, IEEE, the Institute of Physics (IOP), and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) are just a few of the professional societies with their own nano-journals and proceedings, while major STEM publishers such as Wiley and Kluwers also produce titles on the topic. Most of these have nano somewhere in the title although a very fine journal is titled simply, Small. More nano-focused items in our collection can be viewed in the Tufts online catalog as well as the aforementioned nanotechology guide.

Posted in Trend Watch

Monday, 07 September 2009

Trend Watch: Visualization in Scholarly Applications

Publishers in the Science/Technology/Medical (STM) disciplines aren’t content to focus on optimizing text-based content and search engines in online databases. A growing number of these companies now offer visualization tools to enhance discovery.

Among the pioneers in this area are the various web sites which enable users to draw and search on chemical structures or to view existing structures in manipulable 3D models. These features are available in tools such as ChemSpider (acquired by the Royal Society of Chemistry this past spring); the Structure and Property Search feature available in the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics; SciFinder from CSA; PubChem; and Molecule of the Month; to name a few  (Many of these sites used common visual engines, such as the Java-based JMOL, for 3D display of molecular images).

Another entrant is Illustrata, from Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA).  Introduced in 2007, Illustrata offers “deep indexing” databases of images – including tables, charts, figures, graphs – contained within the articles and other materials that CSA indexes.  You can search on the types of images you’re interested in, then view thumbnails of the results displayed in the context of the article’s abstract and other citation details.  According to CSA, beta-testers for Illustrata found the ability to search for and view  images resulted in more precise search results, clearer understanding of the resources they were viewing, and opportunities for comparative analysis as well as inspiration for the design and presentation of their own graphics.

Earlier this year, Nature started offering 3D interactive images in the Acrobat PDF versions of some of its articles.  These images can be rotated and zoomed in or out upon, and displayed with various layers of information and graphics toggled on or off (Versions 9 and above of Acrobat Reader are required to use these tools).

And everywhere we look, Google or Yahoo maps and other geospatial engines are being used offer insights into the geography of research.  Springer’s Authormapper shows the geographic location of its authors (at least of the time of publication) in an interactive Google map (this seems like a handy tool for planning a research trip or sabbatical!). Researcher ID (previously described here) from ISI Web of Science has a similar interface for its authors within its “testing labs.”

Visualization tools are cropping up in all academic disciplines, from geology to medicine. In Tufts’ own backyard, VUE (Visual Understanding Environment) is a interdisciplinary tool for creating concept maps. The Boston Subsurface Project, developed by the Tufts Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, uses a GIS interface to highlight the relationship between the City of Boston’s soils and its history. Such projects are exemplify the statement that pictures tell a thousand stories and, as such, offer new opportunities for discovery and analysis.

Posted in Research Tools, Trend Watch