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« December 2007 | Main | April 2008 »

February 26, 2008

NCBI Field Course Will NOT be Held

In January, it was announced that the University of Illinois would be hosting the Field Guide to NCBI Resources Course.

Unfortunately, that tremendous training opportunity will NOT occur. Yesterday NCBI Field Guide coordinator, Peter Cooper, sent the following email:

Because of budgetary constraints, NCBI has made reductions in some of its programs, and the education programs are affected. In fact, all outreach education programs (Field Guide, Mini-courses, Structures, PubChem) are terminated effective immediately. At this point we cannot reschedule this course or accept requests for future courses of any kind. This was as much a surprise to me as it is to you. Feel free to contact me if you have questions.

The Field Course, as well as the Mini-Courses and the Structure course, has been tremendously popular and useful (see list of sites where the Field Course has been offered recently), but the NCBI budget situation will not allow NCBI to continue to travel and offer these courses for the foreseeable future.

If we would have been able to host the Field Course, registratants would have been asked to print out the PowerPoint slides for the 3-hour lecture presentation, and the Workshop exercises ahead of time. Here they are...

Additionally, you may find the following materials of interest, from the Mini-courses and the Structure Course:

Posted by Katie Newman at 4:49 PM

February 6, 2008

Web of Knowledge -- a recommendation

For Maximum Retrievals in the Agricultural / Biological / Medical Sciences, Search Web of Knowledge.

Recently the Web of Knowledge search platform was revamped, so that now, when you search "all databases", the records are automatically de-duplicated. If the record of interest is in multiple databases (as they frequently are), the default will be to show the Web of Science record for it if it is in Web of Science. In the case of a record that is present in multiple databases, there will be links to other versions of the record from the Web of Science record, in case you prefer to see the record as presented in another database.

Searching Web of Knowledge in the "all databases" searches the following resources, simultaneously:

Take a look at the results of several searches run in each database individually, vs run in the Web of Knowledge All Databases mode. From the results, you can see that you will get more search retrievals from searching the whole Web of Knowledge database, than from searching any of the individual databases.

Recommendation: Search Web of Knowledge in the "All Databases" mode UNLESS you need to:

Note: Many ag / bio / medical resources are NOT included in the Web of Knowledge platform, and, for now, you will need to continue to search them individually. For example:

Posted by Katie Newman at 2:14 PM