Engineering & Mathematics Notebook

Monday, 15 February 2010

Changes to IEEE Xplore Interface

After many months of anticipation, IEEE, the professional association for electrical and computer science and related disciplines, has finally released the overhaul of its Xplore Digital Library interface.

The new interface looks like a number of other websites which have gotten an overhaul (including the recently updated Safari Books and the forthcoming RefWorks 2.0 site); these sites are seemingly simpler and lighter and for some reason feature a predominantly blue or silver on white palette, often with an orange accent.

The new Xplore’s home page opens to a simple Google-like search field. If this seems too broad an option, the Advanced Search link provides tabs for Advanced Keyword/Phrases, Publication Quick Search, and searching via CrossRef and Scitopia.org. Search results show facets for meta data such as author, content type, and affiliation, and publication title and links to Application Notes (product specifications, white papers and other literature from Global Spec) are provided. Other “Web 2.0″-like features include personalization options such as setting preferences, RSS feeds, and alerts. More abstract content is available to non-subscribers.

A summary of Xplore’s new features is available from IEEE’s website.

Posted in Collections News, Engineering

Friday, 12 February 2010

SPIE launches Open Access Journal

SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, has launched its first open access journal, SPIE Reviews. This new title is a peer-reviewed, online journal that publishes invited review articles on optics and photonics and their applications. The journal features links to free full text of review articles published in other SPIE Journals on the SPIE Digital Library and its contents can be retrieved in general searches within the library. Content is available as in abstract, HTML, sectioned HTML, or Acrobat PDF file format.

According to the journal’s editor-in-chief, this journal may be unique in being the only journal to be free to both authors and to readers. Authors do not have incur page charges or open access fees. Readers do not have to pay to view the articles or view related items from subscription journals.

Posted in Collections News, Engineering, Journal Watch

Monday, 11 January 2010

Collections Spotlight: Reaxys Chemistry Database

This past year, the Tufts Library collections added a new entry to its set of chemistry databases: Reaxys.

Owned by Elsevier (publishers of Engineering Village, Scopus, and ScienceDirect, among others), Reaxys provides information on compounds, going back to 1771 for articles and 1876 for patents. It is based on the combined content of CrossFire Beilstein (organic chemistry), CrossFire Gmelin (inorganic and organometallic compounds), and the Patent Chemistry Database (PCD) as well as additional pharmacological, ecological and toxicological data. Searches can be done on substances, reactions, and citations (including patents) as well as by drawing chemical structures.

Reaxys differs from other databases not merely in its content, but also its focus, which is to support the chemistry-related R&D workflow. This focus is reflected in the database’s interface, which merges all search results about a compound or a reaction into a single record which displays substances, reactions, and citations as well as direct links to the full-text of articles (where available through Tufts’ subscriptions) and patents and descriptions of experimental procedures.

Reaxys also includes a “synthesis planner” for evaluating alternative synthetic routes and the ability to identify and combine reaction steps to develop an effective synthetic strategy. Search queries can be based on either reactions or bibliographic information and custom searches based on 9 types of data fields can be built and saved for future use. Search results can be exported in various formats and links are provided to eMolecules, which provides information on commercial suppliers of substances.

Posted in Chemical & Biological Engineering, Collections News, Engineering, Research Tools

Friday, 08 January 2010

Updates to ACS Journals

The American Chemical Society (ACS) has made some recent additions to its online publications.

Through its Division of Chemical Education, ACS now offers the Journal of Chemical Education (JCE) as part of its regular searchable journals collection. Introduced in 1924, JCE is considered one of the premier journals worldwide in chemistry education.  It is a major source for information on chemistry education trends, classroom and curriculum ideas, and reviews of books and products (as such it provides helpful guidance on chemistry-related textbooks). One advantage of its migration to the ACS Journals platform is that its content can be searched upon alongside ACS’s many other publications. In addition, the articles can be viewed in high-quality PDF formats with links to other ACS articles and citations can be downloaded in RIS format for use in bibliographic software such as EndNote, RefWorks, and Zotero.

Other news from ACS includes its participation in EurekaAlert, an online newsletter started by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to reach the rapidly expanding research community in China.  And from the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) comes a new series of video abstracts, which are summaries of recently published JACS articles, presented by the authors themselves. The intent of the videos is to offer a quick introduction for both researchers and others to a key idea or development. 
This series is still in beta; updates can be subscribed to via iTunes and other podcast software.

Posted in Chemical & Biological Engineering, Collections News, Engineering, Journal Watch

Tuesday, 15 December 2009

Safari Books Overhauls its Interface

In October, Safari Books – part of the Tufts eBooks collection, introduced some significant changes to its interface and features.  These include:

• A revised interface which Safari describes as “simplified,”
  enabling access to nearly all levels of the website
  within two clicks.
• The ability to screen the collection by book
  categories or by “short cuts”  (documents
  featuring new technologies or hot topics).
• A more advanced Advanced Search feature, enabling
  the addition of multiple search criteria.
• The ability to switch book content from PDF-like
  text to an HTML interface (this feature is
  still in beta).
• The ability to capture “user-friendly” or relatively
  “tiny” URLs for a specific book page from within
  the book reader screen.
• More navigation options within a book, including
  the ability to turn pages, vertical scrolling,
  multiple zoom levels, keyboard shortcuts, navigation
  among sections from a thumbnail view, and the
  ability to toggle to full-screen mode.
• Context-sensitive Help for the currently active
  page.

Note that the Tufts subscription to Safari, available through ProQuest, is a limited academic subscription which only includes a subset of Safari’s collection and none of the additional bells and whistles, such as personalized account features and training videos.  For titles which are not in our subscription, Tufts affiliates can place an order through Interlibrary Loan. Safari also enables individual users to subscribe to its collection on either a monthly or annual basis, with options to access full text of either all books or 10 titles per month, and discounts on print copy purchases.  These are good deals for heavy users of technology and business books.

Posted in Collections News

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