December 1, 2008
PubMed: Some Links to Full Text not Working
A faculty member reported on November 17th that, using PubMed, he was not able to access the full text of articles from off-campus. Both Library IT and PubMed's IT group have been contacted, but so far (12-9-2008) there has been no resolution to this problem.
UPDATE: AS OF DECEMBER 18TH, THE PROBLEM HAS BEEN RESOLVED!! The problem disappeared once our proxy settings were re-installed.
The issue:
When accessing PubMed from off campus using our proxied URL:
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=406312
which allows the user to authenticate themselves as a U of Illinois member and thus have access to the full text of subscribed journals, the user finds that some of the PubMed links to full text do not work -- in fact, they lead to a blank page.
For any given article in PubMed, you may see several different links to full text:
The Publisher's link (Elsevier, Springer, Oxford, Wiley, etc.):
The "Discover UIUC Full Text Linking" link:
The "Full text for Illinois" link:
For an example, take a look at the PubMed reference for Plant Mol Biol. 2005 May;58(1):65-73.
Until this problem is resolved, the only link that will lead to the full text of the article from off-campus is the "Full text for Illinois" link
-- the other two links just open blank screens!
If the article of interest does not contain the "Full text for Illinois" link, you have several other options for getting to the full text of the article:
Option One:
Go to the ORR (Online Research Resource) , to discover if we have a subscription to the journal. Do this in a separate browser window, so you can retain the citation information (journal, year, volume, pages).
Option Two:
You can drop the citation into the Library's Journal and Article Locator:
http://search.grainger.uiuc.edu/linker/
Enter as much of the citation as you know, or use the copy/paste option to fill in the information for you.
Option Three:
You may want to switch databases, using either Biological Abstracts or Web of Science. The links to full text and "Discover UIUC Full Text Linking" links are working properly in both of these databases.
Option Four:
Change the URL that is at the top of the "blank" page, so that it resolves properly!
Here's an example of a "Discover" URL that, from off-campus through PubMed, resolves to just a blank page:
If you carefully remove the SECOND instance of
".proxy2.library.uiuc.edu"
(both instances are shown bolded, above) from the URL, the link will work! You would edit the above URL to:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.proxy2.library.uiuc.edu/entrez/utils/fref.fcgi?PrId=uiuclib&itool=AbstractPlus-otool&uid=18089771&db=pubmed&url=http://openurl.library.uiuc.edu/sfxlcl3?sid=Entrez:PubMed&id=pmid:18089771
--------------
Remember, this problem is ONLY if you are access PubMed from off-campus. If the records has a "Full text for Illinois" link,
this link should work fine. It's just if this link is not available that you may want to try one of the other alternatives to access the full text.
The library IT continues to work on this problem, and we hope it will be resolved soon.
Send me your email address if you would like to be notified when the links in PubMed are again working properly. - Katie Newman (florador@illinois.edu)
Posted by florador at 12:07 PM
July 6, 2007
Web of Science Dates of Coverage Extended
Web of Science fans will be pleased to learn that we were recently able to extend our coverage back in time significantly.
Although the database is called Web of Science, it is actually composed of three databases. Until recently, searching was limited to references from 1980 to the present.
Coverage for the three databases now is:
Science Citation Index Expanded: 1970-present
Social Science Citation Index Expanded: 1970-present
Arts & Humanities Citation Index: 1975-present **
**1975 is as far back in time as this database is available from the producer.
Posted by florador at 5:30 PM
Google Scholar is Adding Content from Elsevier's ScienceDirect Journals
Big News! Google has recently been given permission to add content from the Elsevier ScienceDirect web portal. This means that, when searching Google Scholar (and possibly Google) we'll be able to search the full text of the nearly 2000 sci-tech journals published by Elsevier.
Until now, the only search engine that searched the full text of Elsevier journals was Elsevier's own search engine for ScienceDirect and it's subscription product, Scopus.
Many researchers are using Google Scholar due to it's ease of use and because it is capable of searching the full text (not just the titles / abstracts) of articles.
If the U of I has a subscription to the retrieved citations, you'll be able to read the articles online. If we don't have a subscription, use the "Discover" link attached to each Google Scholar record to request the article from Interlibrary Loan.
Read more about this announcement.
Posted by florador at 5:28 PM
July 3, 2007
Check the Impact Factor of Your Favorite Journal!
The latest edition of Journal Citation Reports (2006) is now available at
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=258273
JCR provides the Journal Impact Factors, a frequently cited and touted measure of the supposed importance or worth of a journal. Both the Science and Social Science versions of the JCR are available at the University of Illinois; for comparison, we have JCRs back to 1998.
The 2006 impact factors are calculated from the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited by in articles published in journals monitored by Thomson/ISI in their Web of Science product during 2006. The Impact Factors are available for most of the over 8000 journals currently indexed in ISI/Thomson's Web of Science product. It's important to note that the only journals that are said to be citing a particular article are those 8000+ journals that are monitored by Thomson/ISI.
An example of how an impact factor is calculated:
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL INFORMATICS ASSOCIATION
Cites in "all" 2006 articles to articles published in this journal in:
2005 = 236
2004 = 321
Sum: 557
Number of articles published in this journal in:
2005 = 79
2004 = 61
Sum: 140
Impact Factor Calculation:
Cites in 2006 journals to recent (2004-2006) articles / Number of recent articles published
= 557/140
= 3.979
Note: Thomson/ISI is now calculating impact factors for quite a few open access journals. Among the highest ranked are two PLoS journals: 14.1 for PLoS Biology (14.7 in 2006); 13.8 for PLoS Medicine (8.4 in 2006). At least eighteen BioMed Central (BMC) journals also have impact factors.
Posted by florador at 10:31 AM
May 10, 2007
Faculty of 1000 Biology Reaches 45,000 Evaluations!
If you've not yet signed up for an account on Faculty of 1000 Biology, you really owe it to yourself to do so! Senior faculty select significant / controversial articles for inclusion in F1000 Biology, and comment on the relevance of the article. You can browse / search F1000 for articles in your research area. And be sure to sign up for email alerts so you can see keep up with the "hot" papers in your area!
Here's a recent news bulletin about F1000 Biology --- If you haven't already, check it out!
Faculty of 1000 Biology is pleased to announce the publication of its 45,000th evaluation! More than 33,000 distinct papers have now been evaluated on the site (since its launch in 2002) and these have come from over 1100 different journals, thereby fulfilling the aim of Faculty of 1000 Biology to highlight papers on the basis of their scientific merit rather than the journal in which they appear.
The 45,000th evaluation was submitted by Michael Ehlers (University of Chicago, USA), a Faculty of 1000 Biology Member for Neuroscience, who selected a paper from Nature Neuroscience by Kee et al. that "provides compelling evidence that new granule cells of the adult rodent hippocampus born 1-2 months earlier are preferentially active during spatial memory tasks." [see full evaluation]
Identifying evaluations in your areas of interest on the Faculty of 1000 Biology site couldn't be easier -- use 'Advanced Search' to find your papers by author, title, keywords or by F1000 factor -- so there's no need to read all 45,000 evaluations... unless you want to of course!
Posted by florador at 11:04 AM
January 9, 2007
Using CrossSearch to Search Multiple Databases Simultaneously
You may now search several literature indexes simultaneously using the Web of Knowledge search engine:
While searching multiple databases simultaneously in Web of Knowledge (WoK) is handy, it can be tricky! There are several idiosyncrasies or the WoK search engine that you'll want to be aware of:
1. If you start by searching one database, and then want to do a CrossSearch (cross-db search)...
Say you've done a search in Web of Science (WoS), and then want to search all the other dbs in WoK. You'll see in your Search Results-Summary page a link to: "CrossSearch: View additional results in other databases"
If you click on this link, your search will be run in ALL the OTHER databases, but will only bring back results from the past 5 years!. Note: the results from the db that you started will NOT be in the new search result. If you look carefully at the screen, you'd see what was search, e.g., something like:
topic=(honey bee and varroa) Databases=Biological Abstracts, Food Science and Technology Abstracts, MEDLINE, WCI, Zoological Record, CAB Abstracts, EXCLUDING all records in Web of Science; Timespan=Latest 5 Years
Note carefully the timespan and the exclusion note!
2. If you start your search in the initial CrossSearch screen that is available when you go to the WoK screen (the screen that shows all the dbs in WoK):
your search will by default only come back with results from the past 5 years.
and you can only do a "topic" search (not author)
To get the search to bring back results from ALL years or to be able to specify an author, you need to click on the link to the left of the search input box that says "More search fields". Now you'll see input boxes for topic and author searches, and will have several date range options .
3. When you do a CrossSearch, the results come back in three "folders" labelled:
- ISI WoK Results (includes all the dbs that we pay for, including Medline)
- External Collection Results (includes PubMed, Agricola, and other dbs)
- Current Web Contents
So the results are not all blended together. If you want to look at results from one of the External Collections, you'll be taken out to that search engine; that is, you don't stay in WoK.
4. You can save CrossSearch queries (to be run again) but the system does not let you set up autoalerts with these searches; so autoalerts must be set up for each individual db.
5. You'll need to process your CrossSearch "hits" a little differently than usual when it comes time to print or export the results.
As you're looking at CrossSearch results, you'll frequently see the same citation available through multiple databases. This is so you can see the record in the format used for each db. E.g., you might prefer to see the WoS format, where you can see cited references; or you may prefer to see the CAB format, where you can see the CAB descriptors; etc.
Similarly, if you want to mark any of the records for future printing or export, you'll need to choose which db's record you want to print / export; you do this by "marking" the link attached to whichever db you prefer.
Then, when you get ready to print / export, you'll click on the link to the "marked list". But now, instead of just one marked list, you may have 2-6 marked lists -- one for each database! You'll need to process each list separately, for of course they have different fields in them. While this might not be important for the purposes of printing, it IS important if you're exporting the records into EndNote or RefWorks.
6. The options to refine and analyze by author, institution, subject headings, etc. don't function within CrossSearch search results. . This makes sense, since each of the databases has it's own way of creating the records from which this data would be pulled.
Posted by florador at 1:41 PM
January 8, 2007
CAB Abstracts, FSTA & Zoological Record
Our means of accessing CAB Abstracts, FSTA & Zoological Record has changed from SilverPlatter (SPIRS) over to the Web of Knowledge search platform. If you have book-marked links to these resources, please change them to the following URLs:
CAB Abstracts: the largest and most comprehensive database devoted to all aspect of agriculture from crop science, animal science, horticulture and forestry to travel & leisure and veterinary medicine.
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=670820
FSTA: Food Science & Technology Abstracts -- the largest index devoted to food science including food technology, human nutrition, toxicology, packaging and engineering.
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=670819
Zoological Record: Identifies articles on all aspects of animal biology. Coverage includes behavior, ecology, evolution, morphology, and systematics.
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=670821
Of course, the URLs are also available in the Online Research Resources directory,
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/
Other databases available in the Web of Knowledge platform are:
The advantages of having these databases in the Web of Knowledge platform include:
- Ability to search all six databases at the same time, should you need to.
- Many links to the full text. Some go directly to the article a "view full text" button; others will be found by clicking on the Discover button
- Direct export of citations into EndNote
- Ability to refine or analyze your results by journal title, author, subject headings, and more
- Many internal linkages
If you need some help making the transition from SilverPlatter to Web of Knowledge search platform, please contact your friendly, helpful librarian!
Posted by florador at 3:55 PM
August 14, 2006
Faculty of 1000 Has Been "Discovered"!
When you search Faculty of 1000, you'll see a new button, "Discover UIUC full text Linking" !
Click on this link, and a new screen will open that will, in most cases, have a link or links to the online version of the article. If we don't have an e-subscription, you'll find a link to the print subscription record in the catalog, or to the Interlibrary Loan request form.
Bottom line: we want you to get the information you need in a timely fashion!
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Not familiar with F1000?
Particularly useful for graduate students and young scientists, this biology research tool highlights significant or important papers based on the recommendations of over 1,000 leading scientists.
In F1000, biology is divided into 16 faculties, or subjects:
Biochemistry
Bioinformatics
Biotechnology
Cell biology
Chemical biology
Developmental biology
Ecology
Evolutionary biology
Genomics & genetics
Immunology
Microbiology
Molecular biology
Molecular medicine
Neuroscience
Physiology
Plant biology
Structural biology.
Leading researchers (the Faculty) pick new papers to review, commenting on the perceived significance of the selected papers. Features include the ability to view all the key papers within a particular topic or subtopic. One of its most popular features is the continuously updated lists of Hidden Jewels --- interesting articles from less widely read journals. Evaluated articles date from 2002 to the present, for the most part.
Faculty of 1000 Evaluators from the U of I: (and their subject specialty)
Andrew Belmont - CELL BIOLOGY > Nuclear structure & function
Evan DeLucia - ECOLOGY > Physiological ecology
Martin Gruebele -STRUCTURAL BIOLOGY > Protein folding
Steven Huber - PLANT BIOLOGY > Plant biochemistry & physiology
Kim Hughes - GENOMICS & GENETICS > Evolutionary/comparative genetics
David Kranz - IMMUNOLOGY > Antigen processing & recognition
Deborah Leckband - CELL BIOLOGY > Cell adhesion
George Ordal - MICROBIOLOGY > Microbial physiology & metabolism
Scott K. Silverman - STRUCTURAL BIOLOGY > Structure: RNA
Jonathan Sweedler - CHEMICAL BIOLOGY > Chemical biology of the cell
_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_
Search Faculty of 1000:
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=226365
Note: many other UIUC resources have been "Discovered" too, including:
Web of Science
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=258127
Biological Abstracts
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=517749
CAB Abstracts
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=258137
PubMed
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=406312
Environmental Sciences & Pollution Management
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=258157
Posted by florador at 1:01 PM
July 6, 2006
2005 Journal Citation Reports Available
The Journal Citation Report for 2005 is now available.
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=258273
Among other things, this report gives the ISI Impact Factor for 6088 science journals and 1747 social science journals. You may search by journal title, publisher, subject category, or country.
The Impact Factor (IF) of a journal is often taken as a measure of the "worth" of a journal; the higher the impact factor, the more prestigious the journal. Journal publishers and editors are often very interested in IFs, and tout their journal's IF if it is high. Those going up for tenure / promotion are also interested in publishing in journals with high impact factors.
How the Impact Factor is Calculated:
The impact factor is calculated by dividing the number of citations in the JCR year by the total number of articles published in the two previous years. An impact factor of 1.0 means that, on average, the articles published one or two year ago have been cited one time. An impact factor of 2.5 means that, on average, the articles published one or two year ago have been cited two and a half times. Citing articles may be from the same journal; most citing articles are from different journals. Caveat: only citations from journals indexed within the ISI database are counted.
For example, searching by publisher, I found the following 25 titles from the open access publisher, BioMed Central.
GENOME BIOL 9.712
BMC DEV BIOL 5.412
BMC STRUCT BIOL 5.000
BMC BIOINFORMATICS 4.958
BMC MOL BIOL 4.485
BMC EVOL BIOL 4.447
BMC GENOMICS 4.092
BREAST CANCER RES 4.026
GEOCHEM T 3.727
BMC BIOTECHNOL 3.054
ARTHRITIS RES THER 2.965
CRIT CARE 2.932
BMC NEUROSCI 2.733
RESP RES 2.682
BMC CELL BIOL 2.652
BMC MICROBIOL 2.176
BMC CANCER 1.992
BMC INFECT DIS 1.956
BMC GENET 1.769
BMC PUBLIC HEALTH 1.658
BMC HEALTH SERV RES 1.625
BMC GASTROENTEROL 1.455
BMC MUSCULOSKEL DIS 1.316
MALARIA J 0.547 0.377
CURR CONTR TRIALS C 0.231
Usually journals are compared within a particular subject category. For example, Genome Biology is listed in the BIOTECHNOLOGY & APPLIED MICROBIOLOGY category as well as the GENETICS & HEREDITY category. In the BIOTECHNOLOGY & APPLIED MICROBIOLOGY category, Genome Biology has the 4th highest IF out of 139 journals; in the GENETICS & HEREDITY category, it is 10th out of 124.
Enjoy!
Posted by florador at 10:36 AM
March 10, 2006
Accessing Faculty of 1000 from Off-Campus
Several of you have let me know that you're having a difficult time accessing Faculty of 1000 from home.
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=226365
The situation is pretty weird...
- To use F1000 from off campus, one must have first registered when on campus. (I.e., from within the campus IP range.) You can only register when you're on campus.
- Then, to log in from off campus, one must have logged into F1000 while on campus, within the previous 30 days.
- If you've used F1000 within the past 30 days while you're on campus, that's still not good enough, though! You actually have to have been logged in to your "MyF1000" account from on-campus.
- Note: If you allow cookies, you can have your on-campus computer set so that when you access F1000, you're logged in automatically. Test this out: The next time you access F1000 from on-campus, look at the upper left-hand corner of the screen; if you see a message welcoming you (e.g., I see Welcome Katie Newman), you've been logged in automatically.
- When you access F1000 from off-campus, using our special URL, http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=226365 , login as if you have a "personal subscription".
Pretty strange, hey?
There is an alternative!
Use CITES' Virtual Private Networking (VPN) to establish a connection to the University, and to authenticate yourself as a UIUC affiliate. When you use VPN to access resources from off-campus, it's as if your computer were physically located on campus!
Caveat: for VPN to work properly with library resources, you must use the library profile. Read more about VPN, and download the client; be sure to also download the Library profile. When you use the VPN + Library profile, you'll be able to get into F1000 from off-campus, whether you've previously registered with F1000 on campus, or not. (Of course you'll still need to authenticate yourself when you start up the VPN client.)
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Of local interest, I thought you'd be interested to know that UIUC is well represented amongst the nearly 2000 faculty who have been chosen to be evaluators in F1000! Click on the links below to see what they've been recommending!
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign F1000 Evaluators
Andrew Belmont CELL BIOLOGY > Nuclear structure & function
Martin Gruebele STRUCTURAL BIOLOGY > Protein folding
Steven Huber PLANT BIOLOGY > Plant biochemistry & physiology
Kim Hughes GENOMICS & GENETICS > Evolutionary/comparative genetics
David Kranz IMMUNOLOGY > Antigen processing & recognition
Deborah Leckband CELL BIOLOGY > Cell adhesion
George Ordal MICROBIOLOGY > Microbial physiology & metabolism
Scott K. Silverman STRUCTURAL BIOLOGY > Structure: RNA
Jonathan Sweedler CHEMICAL BIOLOGY > Chemical biology of the cell
ps.. I generated this list by clicking on the "Faculty Member List" link, and searching for "Illinois" in the "by institution" search bar.
Posted by florador at 10:04 AM
February 27, 2006
PubMed has been Discovered!
This morning PubMed was Discovered!
"Discover" is the name of the link the Library has been populating most of our major databases with that allows you to discover whether we have e-access to a journal, a print subscription, or whether you need to request the item via Interlibrary Loan.
Bookmark this URL for PubMed!
IF you use the UIUC-specific link for Pubmed
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=406312
(which can be found in the Library's ORR (Online Research Resource),
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/ )
you'll now see that ALL the records have Discover links on them!!
Recommendation:
- Use the Library's URL to access PubMed http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=406312
- After you've run your search, choose to "Display" in "Citation" format. This lets you see all the buttons and links at glance.
- And choose to "Show" at least 100 citations at a time.
- If you see the blue link "Full text provided by the UIUC Library", click on it for direct access to the e-version of the article.
- If that link isn't present, then click on the "Discover UIUC Full Text Linking" button. This will cause the Discover window to pop up, and you'll see your options --
- link(s) for the full text
- a link that will search the UIUC Library online catalog, which will inform you if we have a print subscription
- a link to interlibrary loan, so you can request the item from another university; the form will already be filled in for you
- a link to RefWorks, so you can easily import the citation into Refworks
- a link to Google Scholar, so you can look for similar articles
- link(s) for the full text
I ran a search this morning in PubMed for articles about Apis mellifera (the honeybee), and looked at the first 100 records:
- 77 of these had the "Full text provided by the UIUC Library" link, so I could go directly to the full text of the article
- Via the Discover link, I could go directly to 11 more articles. (These were articles that did NOT have the "Full text provided by the UIUC Library" link)
- And via the Discover link I found that we have a print subscription that contains 2 more articles.
- This left just 10 (out of 100) articles that I would have had to request via Interlibrary loan. And Discover helped with this, too, since it filled in the Interlibrary form for me!
Bottomline:
The University Library wants you to get the research articles that you need! In many cases they are now available electronically. But the worst case scenario is that you'll need to request an article via InterLibrary loan.
Learn more about Discover:
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/discover/ or
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/bicnews/archives/2005/12/discover_full_t.html
Posted by florador at 3:06 PM
December 2, 2005
"Discover" Full Text for Research Articles!
Starting this week, you will begin to see a new button, the Discover Button, next to all the citations in many of our electronic resources, including index and abstract databases.
WHAT IS THE PRIMARY FUNCTION OF THE DISCOVER BUTTON?
The primary function of the button is to give you a link to the full-text version of the article, if UIUC has rights to it.
While many of the databases already have links to the full text in them (e.g., PubMed, Web of Science), through the Discover button, you should uncover e-access for even more publications! If we don't have e-access to the article, the Discover window will provide you with other tools for obtaining the article.
WHAT DOES THE DISCOVER BUTTON DO?
When you click on the Discover button, a new window will pop up that will contain links to various types of resources:
1] Links to the full text of the article (if UIUC has e-access).
2] A link to the UIUC Online Catalog record for the journal (so you can see if we have print / e-access to the journal)
3] A link to Interlibrary Loan, with the citation information already filled in.
4] A link to RefWorks, which will automatically add the citation to RefWorks ***
5] A link to Google Scholar, so you may search for other articles by this author, or other articles on the topic in the Google Scholar database.
WHERE CAN I FIND THE DISCOVER BUTTON?
We're starting by putting the Discover button in all the citations in the Engineering Village databases (Compendex and Inspec), and the databases and journals that we get access to via the ScienceDirect interface. It's also already available in RefWorks*** and in Google Scholar.
The Discover button will appear in most other indexes and abstracts (e.g., PubMed and Web of Science) before the start of the Spring term, 2006. Stay tuned for announcements!
Learn more about the new Discover service, go to:
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/biotech/discover.htm
***RefWorks:
If you don't know about RefWorks, please go to: http://www.library.uiuc.edu/refworks.
Training is available in December, see:
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/bicnews/archives/2005/12/refworks_traini.html
RefWorks is like a web-based "EndNote"! That is, it's a place where you can build your own database of citations, and then pull these citations out of the database to use in your papers -- automatically formatting the citations in the proper format for whichever journal you're submitting your paper to! And, pertinent to this e-mail, ALL of your citations in RefWorks will have a Discover button, providing you with easy access to the full-text of the article!
Faculty: Get your students, grad and undergrads, using RefWorks! It's available for free (courte$y of the Library and CITES) for everyone on campus to use.
Katie
Posted by florador at 3:21 PM
September 27, 2005
Trial: New search interface for Biological Abstracts, CAB Abstracts, Zoological Record & FSTA
We will likely soon be changing over to the Web of Knowledge (WoK) search interface for Biological Abstracts, and possibly also CAB Abstracts, Zoological Record, and Food Science & Technology. All of these are currently running under the SilverPlatter search interface, which may soon be phased out. WoK is the search interface we are currently using for Web of Science (Science Citation Index) access.
We're actually getting access an expanded version of Biological Abstracts called Biosis Previews, which includes citations for review articles as well as abstracts from meetings. All this for less than we're currently paying for Biological Abstracts from SilverPlatter. We don't yet know what kind of "deal" ISI will give us for the other databases.
Besides monetary benefits, there are other reasons for making the switch:
- the WoK interface will allow you to search multiple databases at the same time (e.g., Biosis Previews and Web of Science)
- cited reference linking, so popular in Web of Science, is extended to the other databases
- you may create auto-alerts on topics of interest, which will send you an email when new articles are added to the databases
- ...and much more!
We have a trial running until October 20th for you to try out searching these databases using the Web of Knowledge search engine:
Access any or all the databases via this link:
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/get.php?instid=495591
Please let me (Katie Clark ), Diane Schmidt (Biology) or Pat Allen (Agriculture) know what you think of the possibility of making this switch!
Posted by at 4:55 PM
July 28, 2005
Journal Citation Reports: 2004 data now available
The 2004 data is now available for Journal Citation Reports. Among other stats, this means the 2004 Impact Factors for the journals indexed by ISI are now available.
What does this mean, "2004 Impact Factors"? The Impact Factor is value that is often used as a measure of the worth of a journal. It is calculated from the number of articles that where published in 2004 that cited articles published in 2003 or 2002 in a particular journal. The higher an Impact Factor, the more cited a journal is, and, presumably, the higher it's impact (importance) in a particular field. Many squabble with the way IFs, but they are often used as a measure of the worth of a journal!
JCR also has been upgraded with enhancements that expand its analytical capabilities beyond the journal level to include categories, making it easier for users to spot trends in journal coverage and facilitate collection management decisions.
Enhancements include:
- Category level analysis — Much of the same statistical information available for individual journals is now available for journal categories, for data from 2003 forward. This provides a view of coverage, citation behavior and relationships across an entire subject. Cited Category and Citing Category lists show the most frequently cited journals in the subject. This information helps put a journal's impact factor into context.
- At the journal level, the Source Data table for items now includes "other" to account for non-scholarly items like news, commentaries, and editorial material — which makes it possible to understand more accurately the size and content of a publication.
- Headings have changed from "Country" to "Country and Territory", making geographic representation more accurate.
- Category scope notes are now edition- and year-specific, which ensures that scope notes most accurately reflect the content of each category.
Posted by at 10:40 AM