Engineering & Mathematics Notebook

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

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

Thursday, 30 July 2009

Trend Watch: More Databases go Mobile

A growing number of our research databases are going mobile, e.g. providing applications optimized specifically for iPhones, Blackberries, and other mobile devices. These typically are very streamlined apps designed for small screens and folks on the go. One example is IEEE Xplore, which has built a beta mobile version of its digital library. Xplore Mobile lets you search search – for free – on all Xplore documents and view up to 10 article abstracts per search. You can email the article links to yourself and then view them via the Tufts IEEE Xplore subscription. Another mobile application comes from RefWorks, the bibliographic citation tool that we offer. RefMobile lets you search and view the references in your RefWorks account; manage folders; create new references through its SmartAdd feature; and annotate your references. Expect to see more of such applications in the coming year.

Posted in Journal Watch, Research Tools, Trend Watch

Sunday, 26 July 2009

The U.S. still ranks highest in publications in engineering journals

In April, 2009, Essential Science Indicators, a journal citation analytic tool from Thomson Reuters, (publishers of ISI Web of Science) released a list of the 20 countries with the highest total citations in papers published in the engineering journals that are indexed by Thomson Reuters. The complete list covers 96 countries for the period 1998-2008 and ranks these countries by the number of cited papers, citations, and citations per paper. In terms of cited papers and citations, the U.S. ranked the highest, with 202,141 papers attracting 1,115,430 citations. For total papers, the next highest countries were Japan, China, England, Germany, and France For citations per paper, however, the U.S. ranked 8th.

Essential Science Indicators enables users to drill down into these statistics by scientists, academic discipline, country or region, and institution. Papers coded for engineering alone at Tufts have a current citation per paper factor of 6.83. School of Engineering authors are also represented in the Materials Science field, with a citation per paper factor of 23.03, while the overall institution has a 20.15 factor, all of which are above the national average.

These summary statistics can be drilled down upon within the Essential Science Indicators to reveal some interesting trends. For example, although China’s recent output is still less than half of the U.S., between1999-2008 its increase in output was five times that of the U.S. All these statistics, and the methodology behind them, need to be carefully understood and analyzed before drawing any conclusions. In addition, because the indicators only cover journals tracked by Thomson Reuters, they do not address the entire engineering publishing scene.

Posted in Engineering, Journal Watch, Research Tools

Sunday, 19 July 2009

TDNET Links to Journal Citation Factors

Researcher ID program is the service that the Tufts University libraries use to provide access to many of our electronic journal subscriptions. The Libraries recently activated a feature within TDNet which links journals to Thomson ISI Journal Citation Reports (JCR). JCR features the well-known journal impact factor, which measures how often the “average article” in a journal has been cited. This factor has been used in a range of evaluation processes, from libraries’ journal selections to authors’ decisions on where to submit manuscripts for publication.
If a journal in TDNet has an impact factor, a small, framed JCR icon appears next to its title in the TDNET list view. Clicking on the icon takes you to the related JCR record, where you can view an impact factor trend graph for the past five years and hyperlink to the statistics that produce the factor.

Posted in Journal Watch

Saturday, 18 July 2009

Research ID: Visibility for Published Authors

One of the challenges in gathering accurate citation statistics about the works of authors in scholarly publications is, well, the authors themselves. Citation statistics are prone to error in part because of the limited mechanisms for tracking author information. Journals can be tracked by their unique ISSN numbers and, increasingly, individual articles by their DOI identifiers, but authors aren’t tracked by unique identifiers such as social security numbers. Moreover, journals and literature databases vary considerably in how they present authors’ names. This creates problems in the compilation of citation statistics for authors, as multiple treatments of an author’s name may not be consolidated (e.g. “disambiguated”).

Thomson Reuters, purveyor of ISI Web of Science and Web of Knowledge, offers a means to limit disambiguation while providing visibility for authors. Its Researcher ID program, a “global, multi-disciplinary scholarly research community,” provides its members with a unique Research ID. Participants control whether their profile is private or public and what citations are featured. Public profiles, which do not require access to Web of Science to be viewed, can be screened by author name, keyword, or institution (as of this writing, Tufts has 29 participants). Profiles feature both an author-generated bibliography as well as citation data from publications tracked by Web of Science, the latter presented as a graph alongside citation statistics. A new “beta” feature, Researcher labs, displays researchers’ networks and citing authors in charts organized by colleagues, research categories, countries, and institutions, alongside a Yahoo map mashup of research networks. In their own websites, participating researchers can include a logo which links to their Researcher ID profile.

Posted in Journal Watch, Research Tools