Levy Library

Classes! Scopus, EndNote, NCBI, etc.

We've just added some classes to our schedule, including a few new ones. If you're interested in finding out who is citing your papers, or using that information to calculate metrics like the h-index, sign up to learn about one of our newest resources, SciVerse Scopus. And, as usual, we have lots of classes available to help you with all kinds of things, including literature searches (Scopus, PubMed), managing your references (EndNote, RefWorks), preparing presentations and publications (Photoshop, PowerPoint), and finding genetic and genomic information (NCBI, genome browsers, pathway analysis software and more).

You can find more information and register for classes at http://librarycf.mssm.edu/levy/classes/.

New! Sciverse Scopus Database

We're pleased to announce a new addition to our databases list: Sciverse Scopus. Scopus is a large interdisciplinary database that covers the gamut of scholarly publication. It also provides some nice tools to let you see which articles cite the paper that you are looking at, compare the prominence of different journals by looking at citation patterns, and calculate metrics like the h-index. Sounds a lot like Web of Science? Yes! You can do a lot of similar things with the two databases, though they have very different interfaces and search different content. For example:

The Web of Science record for the 1976 article by Raskin and Knittle entitled "Ice-cream headache and orthostatic symptoms in patients with migraine", from the journal Headache, shows that it has been cited by 44 other articles. Finding the record in Scopus for the same article shows only 28 citations. One reason: although you can find articles in Scopus from decades ago, citation information is only included from 1996 onwards. So Web of Science can tell you that N. Bird cited Raskin's article in 1992, but Scopus can't.

It's not only the different citation dates that are different between these two databases though: because they don't index all the same journals, you'll see differences in citation counts even in recent articles. For example, N.M. Pugno's 2007 Journal of Physics - Condensed Matter article, "Towards a Spiderman suit: large invisible cables and self-cleaning releasable superadhesive materials" shows more citations in Web of Science, while A. Taylor's 2006 Academy of Management Journal article "Superman or Fantastic Four? Knowledge and experience in innnovative teams" shows more citations in Scopus.

There are also some articles that you'll only find in one database or the other: only Web of Science can give you citation information for Hume, M (2005) "Unsinkable - Is Loretta Lynn country music's Scarlett O'Hara?" Journal of Country Music 24(2):16-23, while only Scopus can tell you about Ramakrishnan, PA (2004) "'Unsinkable' boat has foam centre" Reinforced Plastics 48(7).

The moral? Try both, and decide which you prefer. If you need citation information from before 1996, Web of Science is the way to go. If you don't, Scopus has an interface that many people find more intuitive, plus a very handy algorithm that helps with those difficult author searches (maybe another blog post on this later!). And, if you want to be as comprehensive as possible in creating a list of who's citing an article, use both, as they'll each give you slightly different results (I'd suggest adding Google Scholar to your search strategy as well!).

As with all our resources, please let us know if you have questions or comments. Happy searching!

Web of Science Classes

Need to find Impact Factors, highly cited papers, or papers that aren't in PubMed? Web of Science is the place to go. It can be a fussy database to use though - not all of its features are obvious, and it asks for some pretty specific input formats. We're here to help! We've added a couple of Web of Science workshops to our classes schedule: the first one is tomorrow from 11:00 - 12:00 in the Library. You can register for it at http://librarycf.mssm.edu/levy/classes/.

If you can't make the class, we also have a Web of Science tutorial that you can work through on your own, as well as quick guides to general searching and cited reference searching.

Names and Numbers

 

I was trying to come up with some good searching examples this morning, and kept running into an old problem with library research - trying to keep authors with similar names separate, while at the same time trying to keep track of researchers who may have published under more than one name. Sure, many resesarchers try to consistently publish under the same name (e.g. continuing to use a maiden name instead of a married name), but sometimes journal formats and database indexers make this difficult: an author may appear as J O'Brien in one journal, JP O Brien in another, and James OBrien in a third. You can find all of these names by using ORs and truncation in your searches (e.g. obrien j* OR o'brien j* OR o brien j* in Web of Science), but then you'll also retrieve everything by John and Joan and Joaquin O'Brien, not to mention that other James O'Brien (I once knew a researcher who'd never had a middle name; he adopted an initial in graduate school in an attempt to differentiate himself from the other researcher in the same field who had the same name). So, what to do? Unfortunately, there are still no good solutions. Many scientists and publishers are advocating the development of a numbering system to keep track of who wrote what - this would be beneficial, but would most likely require each author to ensure that each of their publications is linked to their unique number. Database developers are also working on algorithms to separate papers into groups likely written by the same author, but researchers with name changes, institution changes and new research directions tend to stay a few steps ahead of those algorithms.

If you're interested in some of the potential solutions, take a look at this recent Science article by Martin Enserink (link works on campus only), and http://www.researcherid.com from Thomson-Reuters.

In the meantime, if you are trying to find all the articles by a certain H. Wang or J. Smith, you can try to narrow down your results list by adding other information to your search, such as institutional affiliation, publication years or subject keywords, but be prepared for a mixed bag of results!

Visualizing Article Citations

You might already know that you can use Web of Science to look up articles that have cited one of your papers, or a paper of interest to you. This can be a great way to find related articles, especially if your topic is obscure or hard to search for. Now, Web of Science's new Citation Mapper tool adds another level to citation searching: starting with one article of interest, you can build a map of citations, going backward and forward up to two generations. You'll generate a web-like map of citation connections that you can color-code and label according to author, journal, subject, institution and more.

For example, try starting with Dr. Jeffrey Laitman's 1997 article in the American Journal of Medicine, "The human aerodigestive tract and gastroesophageal reflux: an evolutionary perspective". By finding this record in the Web of Science and clicking its "Citation Map" link, you can generate a map (I used the options to generate a map of 2 generations, forwards and backwards). Using the map's Appearance button to set the Node Text to Subject Category, you can see that this General Medicine article was cited by papers in Immunology, Dentistry, Nursing and Neurosciences journals, which were in turn cited by articles in journals about subjects ranging from Acoustics to Pediatrics. This can be a great visual to track the evolution of an idea or, if you Citation Map your own articles, to find potential interdisciplinary collaborators.

New Citation Report feature in Web of Science

Web of Science has announced a new feature called Citation Report.  Citation Report allows you to quickly view citation activity for a paper or group of papers over time.  You can quickly determine an average citation rate, create graphs, and determine the h-index.   The h-index, proposed in this 2005 article by JE Hirsch, is a bibliometric measure that can be useful in measuring a researcher's relative impact on his/her discipline.  Find out more about how to use Web of Science's Citation Report here.