Science Library Blog
April 24, 2008
Life-changing books: Recommendations from 17 Leading Scientists
The NewScientist asked 17 leading scientists to name the book that had the most influence on their lives. Click here to read the recommendations and to post an account of your own life-changing book in the comments.
Posted by erushton at 10:58 AM
October 17, 2007
Nobel Prize winners' research articles freely available from IOP
IOP Publishing has made selected articles from this year's Nobel Prize winners in chemistry and physics available at no charge on the web. More details are below.
From the IOP website:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/news/-topic=1257
The 2007 Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded to both Albert Fert (Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France) and Peter Grünberg (Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany) for their independent work on Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR). The work carried out by Fert and Grünberg has revolutionised and influenced the path for modern technology, making storage devices such as MP3 players and laptops become smaller in weight and appearance yet larger in storage capacity each year.
The 2007 Nobel Prize for Chemistry has been awarded to Gerhard Ertl (Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Berlin, Germany) for his experimental investigations into the various effects of reactions taking place on surfaces.
Fert, Grunberg and Ertl have all published work within a range of IOP journals including Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter and Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics as well as in the partner journals: Europhysics Letters (EPL) and New Journal of Physics. As a service to the community, we are pleased to make the papers relevant to their prize freely available until the end of 2007:
EPL
Low-field colossal magnetoresistance in manganite tunnel spin valves
M. Viret et al
Roughness-induced enhancement of giant magnetoresistance in epitaxial Fe/Cr/Fe(001) trilayers
D. Olligs et al
Inverse giant magnetoresistance due to spin-dependent interface scattering in Fe/Cr/Au/Co
M. Buchmeier et al
Direct Imaging of Adsorption Sites and Local Electronic Bond Effects on a Metal Surface: C/Al(111)
H. Brune et al
Fluctuation-induced pattern formation in a surface reaction
J. Starke et al
Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter
Layered magnetic structures: facts, figures, future
P Grünberg
Exchange coupling of ferromagnetic films across metallic and semi conducting interlayers
D E Bürgler et al
Correlation of magnetotransport and structure in sputtered Co/Cu multilayers
Amitesh Paul et al
Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics
Experiments on the relation between GMR and interface roughness and on the interlayer exchange coupling across semiconductors
P Grünberg et al
Spin injection and experimental detection of spin accumulation
A Fert et al
New Journal of Physics
Localized nonequilibrium nanostructures in surface chemical reactions
M Hildebrand et al
Posted by ebrown at 11:10 AM
July 27, 2007
Update on Patent Lens
Back in 2005, we posted a blog entry about Cambia Patent Lens a free full-text patent search database. Since then, the database has grown from 1.5 million documents to more than 7 million. The database is updated weekly.
Posted by amcmanus at 07:14 AM
July 07, 2007
Darwin Correspondence Project
The Darwin Correspondence Project, run by archivists at the University of Cambridge, recently released an online archive of Charles Darwin’s Letters. The database contains around 14500 entries which summarise the contents of all the known surviving letters written both by and to Charles Darwin. Around 5000 of those entries include complete transcriptions of the letters, taken from the published volumes of The correspondence of Charles Darwin (Burkhardt et al., Cambridge University Press 1985-). Click here to access the database....
Posted by erushton at 02:35 PM
May 08, 2007
New Beta Version of Entrez Database
The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is getting ready to launch it's new Entrez databases. The database is currently available in BETA. Click here to read the update.
Posted by erushton at 11:55 AM
May 04, 2007
Science.gov Releases Version 4.0
The Science.gov Alliance recently released version 4.0 of the Science.gov website.
New features include:
*DeepRank - uses information gathered from the full-text document, when available, to perform relevancy ranking.
*Refine results - allows you to refine results by searching for another term or phrase within the original set of results.
*Result sorting - sort and view results by title, date or author as well as by relevancy rank and source.
*E-mail results - allows you to e-mail the results to yourself or another person or listserv, along with an optional comment.
Posted by erushton at 02:19 PM
February 02, 2007
British Library, U.S. DOE Partner on Science Portal
News item from LJ Newswire posted to the Science & Technology Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries.
The British Library (BL) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
have announced a collaborative effort to develop a global science
gateway, to be named Science.world. The free online resource will
eventually make accessible science information resources from
many countries via a single Internet portal. Following the model
of Science.gov, offered by a group of U.S. federal agencies, the
Science.world effort will rely on scientific resources published
by each participating nation.
"Our goal is to speed up the sharing of knowledge on a global
scale. As a result, we believe that science itself will speed
up," said Raymond Orbach, DOE undersecretary for science.
For the DOE, the project marks a return of sorts. On November 4,
2002, the lights went out on PubSCIENCE, the DOE's effort to
offer a free multi-disciplinary database in the physical
sciences. PubSCIENCE allowed users to search across abstracts and
citations of multiple publishers at no cost. The effort quickly
became the target of an intense lobbying campaign, spearheaded by
the Washington-based Software & Information Industry Association
(SIIA), which claimed that PubSCIENCE competed with its members'
services.
It was not immediately clear what resources the new portal would
provide, although a British Library news release said the
project's aim was "direct, free searching of open source
collections and portals" that would "complement existing
information collections and systems."
Posted by amcmanus at 08:50 AM
January 31, 2007
Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online
The largest collection of Darwin's writings is now available on the website The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online. The site contains Darwin's complete publications, many handwritten manuscripts and the largest Darwin bibliography and manuscript catalogue ever published. There are over 160 ancillary texts, from reference works to reviews, obituaries, recollections and more. Free mp3 downloads are available. Read more from the press release here...
Posted by erushton at 10:58 AM
September 18, 2006
Open Letter from Nature Publishing Group
Nature Publishing Group recently published an open letter to customers. Highlights from the letter include:
* The Nature Podcast, launched in the autumn of 2005, had up to 40,000 downloads per week.
* Nature Materials saw an increase of more than two points in its impact factor, to 15.941, and Nature Reviews Microbiology increased nearly five points to 13.989.
* Nature Physics was launched in October 2005, and is performing well.
* In 2007, Nature will be launching Nature Photonics and Nature Nanotechnology
Posted by erushton at 05:12 PM
September 12, 2006
RSS Feeds and Podcasts from the NLM
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has created a list of its RSS Feeds and Podcasts. Click here to view the list.
Posted by erushton at 11:47 AM
August 02, 2006
New Environmental Health and Toxicology Search Engine
ToxSeek is a new meta-search and clustering engine for environmental health and toxicology. ToxSeek allows users to search multiple resources including:
*TOXNET (NLM): a databases on hazardous chemicals, toxic releases and environmental health.
* NIH: resources from other institutes of the National Institutes of Health.
*U.S. Government: Toxicology/environmental health information from other United States government agencies.
*International: selected international resources, such as the World Health Organization (WHO).
*Resources/Societies: other topic-specific information resources.
Posted by erushton at 10:30 AM
July 28, 2006
Top Five Science Blogs
According to Nature, of 46.7 million blogs indexed by the Technorati blog search engine, five scientists' sites make it into the top 3,500. The Nature article is available to read here. The top five blogs are:
pharyngula (Rank 179th)
"Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal."
The Panda's Thumb (Rank 1,647th )
The virtual pub of the University of Ediacara. The patrons gather to discuss evolutionary theory, critique the claims of the antievolution movement, defend the integrity of both science and science education, and share good conversation.
RealClimate (Rank 1,884th)
A commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists.
Cosmic Variance (Rank 2,174th).
A blog about science, but also arts, politics, culture, technology, academia, and miscellaneous trivia.
The Scientific Activist (Rank 3,429th)
A source for news and commentary on science, politics, and the exciting areas where these dynamic fields clash
Posted by erushton at 10:07 AM
July 13, 2006
Nature Peer Review Trial and Debate
Nature is trialing a new form of open peer review for authors who submit papers to the journal. The trial is optional. Participating authors allow Nature to post their manuscript publicly. According to Nature, “scientists may then post comments, provided they identify themselves. Once the usual confidential peer review process is complete, the public 'open peer review' process will be closed. Editors will then read all comments on the manuscript and invite authors to respond. At the end of the process, as part of the trial, editors will assess the value of the public comments.”
More information about the trial is available here.
Also of interest, Nature is hosting a web debate about peer review. Read the 22 commissioned articles or post your own comments the topic.
Posted by erushton at 01:28 PM
June 15, 2006
Podcasts from Seedmagazine.com
Seedmagazine.com, publishers of Seed Magazine, offers a series of science related podcasts. Recent stories include:
- how whales lost their legs
- drunk monkeys are a lot like drunk people
- a pill for reawakening the comatose
Found via Confessions of a Science Librarian
Posted by erushton at 10:17 AM
May 15, 2006
Binghamton Research Rocks Podcasts
The Division of Research at Binghamton University has launched a Binghamton Research Rocks podcast series. Each episode in the series describes a research project currently underway here at BU. Click here to listen or subscribe to the latest podcasts
Posted by erushton at 11:57 AM
April 05, 2006
100 or so Books that shaped a Century of Science
The magazine American Scientist has published their list of “100 or so Books that shaped a Century of Science.” Click here to view the list
Found via Confessions of a Science Librarian
Posted by erushton at 06:53 PM
December 14, 2005
PubMed Online Training Page
PubMed has created a new PubMed Online Training page. This page links to the PubMed Tutorial (based on the NLM's one-day PubMed training course) and a variety of animated tutorials with audio.
From: NLM Technical Bulletin
Posted by erushton at 08:10 PM
December 13, 2005
RSS Feeds and Podcasts from the U.S.Government
The U.S. Government has created a RSS Library of their news feeds. You can find RSS feeds for various topics including Agriculture and Energy, Health and Science. You can also search for U.S. Government Podcasts. Examples of government podcasts include Health Care Information from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Science Feature Stories and Oak Ridge National Laboratory Research and Development News.
Posted by erushton at 10:07 AM
December 06, 2005
Nature Blogs
Nature Publishing Group has recently launched three new blogs.
Nascent: Nature Publishing Group's blog on web technology and science.
Action Potential: Nature's neuroscience blog.
Free Association: Nature's genetics blog.
Found on Library Stuff
Posted by erushton at 03:08 PM
November 08, 2005
Popular Science: Worst Jobs in Science
Popular Science has recently published its third annual honor roll of the Worst Jobs in Science. Included in this years jobs are Volcanologist, Nuclear-Weapons Scientist, and Kansas Biology Teacher. Read the full article here…
Posted by erushton at 04:21 PM
New Version of Science.gov
Science.gov, the science information gateway of the U.S. Government, will be launching a new version of their site. Some features of the version 3.0 include enhanced advanced searching, more intuitive site navigation and query input improvements. Read more here…
Posted by erushton at 04:10 PM