Archive for the ‘literature’ Category
CSL: the 2790th citation style in Mendeley!!
Most academic journals insist that papers submitted to them conform to the journals own, idiosyncratic citation style. This has led to a proliferation of thousands of different citation styles, often with only minuscule differences in the placement of commas, or the use of quotation marks and italics. To support their users in this arduous task, modern reference management tools like Mendeley ship with 2,789 different citation styles that can be used when formatting a bibliography in Word or Open Office.
It turns out that 2,789 was still not enough. Being able to edit and create new citation styles easily was the top-ranked feature request by a wide margin on Mendeley’s user feedback board. Users frequently lamented that the one particular style they needed was not covered, or that they were unable to switch from tools such as EndNote or RefWorks as long as a particular style was lacking. The citation styles in EndNote or RefWorks are built in a closed, proprietary format, which prevents their re-use in other referencing tools. In response, scholars have created the open source CSL (Citation Style Language) standard, which has since been implemented in tools such as Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, Docear, and Qiqqa. (…)
Mendeley’s global community of 2 million academics have collectively uploaded more than 300 million research documents to the platform, making it one of the world’s largest academic databases. Now, Mendeley will apply the same principle of crowdsourcing to citation styles.
Mendeley Introduces Open Source Citation Style Editor. Information Today, the 6th of December 2012.
Reading: Is Google Scholar better than PubMed ?!
According this study, PubMed searches and Google Scholar searches often identify different articles. In this study, Google Scholar articles were more likely to be classified as relevant, had higher numbers of citations and were published in higher impact factor journals.
Nourbakhsh, E., Nugent, R., Wang, H., Cevik, C. and Nugent, K. (2012), Medical literature searches: a comparison of PubMed and Google Scholar. Health Information & Libraries Journal, 29: 214–222.
Skepticism of Google Scholar is merited
Skepticism of Google Scholar is merited. Google Scholar is lacking as a scholarly search tool because, first and foremost, it is not an abstracting and indexing service like the bibliographic databases frequently recommended by librarians. Those databases have literature indexed, often by humans, allowing it to be categorized with a controlled vocabulary and subject headings. Google Scholar is a search engine and as such it searches the full text, bibliographic information, and metadata of electronic documents. The computer programming that allows this to happen lacks the objective eye of a human indexer and, consequently, data is interpreted incorrectly and questionable sources pass through algorithms. Google Scholar’s methods of document retrieval are contrary to librarians’ understanding and expectation of information organization. Google Scholar’s inability or unwillingness to elaborate on what documents its system crawls and the uncertain quality of Google Scholar’s performance provides further reasons for information professionals and researchers to be wary of this tool, especially when so many quality databases exist and seem to sufficiently meet scientific information needs.
Gray, Jerry E. Scholarish: Google Scholar and its Value to the Sciences. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, Summer 2012. Available from:
http://www.istl.org/12-summer/article1.html
Mendeley, the most extensive STM database?
UK-based start-up Mendeley has announced that the number of queries to its database from external applications has surpassed 100 million per month. More than 240 applications received for research collaboration, measurement, visualisation, semantic markup and discovery – all of which have been developed in the past year – receive a constant flow of data from Mendeley.
The information fuelling this ecosystem has been crowdsourced by the scientific community itself, somewhat like Wikipedia. Using Mendeley’s suite of document management and collaboration tools, in just three years its global community of 1.9 million researchers has created a shared database containing 65 million unique documents.
This, according to recent studies, covers 97.2 to 99.5 percent of all research articles published. Commercial databases by Thomson Reuters and Elsevier contain 49 million and 47 million unique documents respectively, but access to their databases is licensed to universities for tens of thousands of dollars per year.
More information at:
http://www.researchinformation.info/news/news_story.php?news_id=1000
Build your Product Literature Database with Quosa Virtual Library
Commercial info from QUOSA, a company recently acquired by Elsevier:
You need a consolidated literature archive capturing all of the full-text articles, conference abstracts, patents and related documents relevant to your products or project, perhaps complete with tagging specific to your company.
QUOSA provides:
- Automated alerts and import of the full-text literature, integrated with your preferred search platforms
- A robust, copyright-compliant archive structure with fully configurable meta-data and tagging architecture
- Easy- to-use access options, including browser-based search, email and RSS Alerts, dynamic links, and automatically generated reporting templates
http://quosa.com/article-archive-product-literature-database
Biblimed: a review by Intellogist
BibliMed is a free search interface that accesses MEDLINE data and provides unique search and viewing features like a tag cloud of MeSH term suggestions to add to your search and a list of books relevant to your query.
BibliMed may not include the command line search option that makes PubMed attractive to expert searchers, but the intuitive and creative search features on BibliMed will be very useful for students and novice searchers who aren’t comfortable crafting complex queries and using MeSH terms…
Read Further at:
Mornini, Joelle. The Intuitive Alternative to PubMed: Search MEDLINE on BibliMed. Intellogist, 1st of July 2012. Available from:
http://intellogist.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/the-intuitive-alternative-to-pubmed-search-medline-on-biblimed/
[Accessed 10th July 2012]
PubMed: A few recent changes… (by Intellogist)
Joelle Mornini, from the great Intellogist webiste, has listed a few recent changes that happened in PubMed.
In a few words, nothing revolutionary… Her conclusion is:
“The filters sidebar replaces a cumbersome “limits” page that took a few extra clicks to access and apply to the search results. Now, users can instantly refine their search directly from the results list. The “sorted by computed author” search and the versioned citations both help users more quickly rank and identify the most relavent results or versions of a result. The “Save items” portlet and “Citation manager” option allow the user to quickly compile and export the most relevant results into a concise list that can be manipulated through any type of citation manager software. These subtle changes to the PubMed interface may not seem like enormous improvements, but they can save a prior art searcher time when every second counts“
See the full article at:
Mornini, Joelle. 5 recent changes to the PubMed interface, Intellogist, 19 June 2012. Available from:
http://intellogist.wordpress.com/2012/06/19/5-recent-changes-to-the-pubmed-interface/
[Accessed 20 June 2012]
Personaly, I would rather say that switching to great alternatives such as GoPubMed, PubGet or Biblimed, instead of using this poor PubMed will save precious minutes!!! See my previous post…
Rent your article to read it!
Everyday tens of millions of information professionals visit journal websites looking for mission critical articles — only to abandon the process when confronted and confounded by a pay wall.
For those users that decide to open their wallets, many times they become frustrated when a misleading abstract leads to a “wasted” article purchase. Aside from the actual out of pocket expense, valuable time is also expended searching across dozens of publisher sites, remembering (or more likely forgetting) account IDs and passwords, and dealing wtih the myriad of different shopping and checkout procedures.
DeepDyve was created to serve these millions of information professionals who are “unaffiliated” with an academic or governmental institution and therefore lack funded access to this content. Our users are knowledge workers in businesses large and small who need affordable and convenient access to authoritative research that is vital to their profession.
With DeepDyve, users can “rent” an article from anywhere they have a browser and an internet connection — for as little as $0.99.
What exactly is “renting”? Renting an article means you can read the full article as much as you like until it expires (7 days or longer), but it cannot be downloaded or printed.
Mendeley: a “Facebook for Researchers”?
Aaron Tay gives here an interesting vision of this still-promising tool:
“while looking at the features I finally grasped how powerful and disruptive a real and dominant “Facebook for researchers” is going to be. (…)
Of course, the road to such a goal has being strewn with many failures, including Elsevier’s 2collab , Labmeeting etc (check a report in 2008 of such tools and check how many still stands) and attempts have being or could be made from social bookmarking/reference management angle (e.g citeulike/Connotea/Mendeley), Discovery/Search angle (potentially webscale discovery/next generation catalogues with social features) or even more directly straight forward Identity management (e.g. ResearcherID).
But no matter who wins how would a dominant “Facebook for researchers” platform affect academic research and hence academic libraries? What areas would they disrupt? (..)
Disrupt search including webscale discovery tools
Mendeley , Citeulike etc are already starting to show hints of this, when you search you can see how many people put a certain article in their reference libraries, that itself could be a strong signal of quality. (…)
Currently Mendeley claims to have 150 million unique items (Jan 2012) when you search Mendeley , ”This makes it, according to Victor Henning, the company’s CEO and co-founder, the world’s largest research database.” (…)
Read more at:
Tay, Aaron. How a “Facebook for researchers” platform will disrupt almost everything. Musing about librarianship, April 18, 2012. Available at:
http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/how-facebook-for-researchers-will.html
[Accessed 18th April 2012]
