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Library Workshops

This semester, the Library is offering the following workshops to help pump up your research skills. Please let your students know.  Hope to see you here!

Alerting Services for the Sciences

Thursday, Feb. 21, 2008, 10-11:00 am and 2-3:00 pm
USF Tampa Library LIB 209

Workshop Description: What is an Alert Service? Why use an Alert Service? How can it help you with your research? Find out more about how this database service works, how you can use it to streamline your research, and why it is important for you to know how to use it. Set up an alert service using a major scientific database during this workshop.

Intended Audience: Faculty, graduate and undergraduate students in the sciences.

Click here to register.

Researching the Literature in the Social Sciences:  Beyond the Basics

Friday, February 29, 2008, 2-4:00 pm
USF Tampa Library LIB 209

Workshop Description: You know the basics—the library catalog, the databases in your discipline and many of the tools for coursework and basic projects, but now you want to go deeper either because you are getting ready for writing your thesis or you want to submit a manuscript for publication. This workshop will cover the tools researchers use to go beyond the basics to do an exhaustive review of the literature. Learn how to follow the bibliographic trail by using super-googling techniques, World Catalog, cited author references, and bibliographies.

Intended Audience: Faculty, graduate and honors students in the social sciences.

Click here to register.

Using the ideas of others: Citing sources and avoiding plagiarism

Wednesday, March 12, 2008, 2-3:30 pm
USF Tampa Library LIB 209

Workshop Description: Almost all fields of research involve the intensive tracing of theories and ideas already authored. As critical thinkers, we are invited to evaluate, extend, and create our own ideas by examining the fine research available. There’s always an art to science, however, and part of this art involves using the right sources and giving proper credit to the academic achievements already published. This workshop will explore the basics of citation and its many styles, as well as how to avoid plagiarism and use new tools, like RefWorks.

Intended Audience: Faculty, graduate and honors students in all academic areas.

Click here to register.

Citations Cramping Your Style: Use RefWorks

Multiple dates or suggest your own date.
USF Tampa Library

Workshop Description: RefWorks is an online bibliographic management program that allows faculty, students, and staff at USF to create a personal database of references. Learn how to automatically export citations from a search performed in some online databases or enter citations manually and then automatically create your bibliography in a host of styles including APA, MLA, Chicago, or Turabian. RefWorks can also be used to organize your citations by topic. Or, try the Write-n-Cite addon with MicroSoft Word to input in-text citations and automatically generate a bibliography when your paper/article is complete. USF faculty, staff and students have unlimited access to this software.

Intended Audience: Faculty, graduate and undergraduate students in any discipline.

Click here to register.

Journal Rankings

Check out this *NEW* free web service, RedJasper, for ranking journals.
Users are encouraged to "configure their ranking interests, as well as provide a more reasonable method to evaluate a journal's impact".

ISI Web of Knowledge

We’d like to let you know that the next ISI Web of Knowledge upgrade will now take place on February 03, 2008.

More Reference eBooks

The Encyclopedia of Hydrological Sciences
Provides research level coverage of fresh water resources, an area of heightened research due to population increase, pollution and degradation of resources, and variations in regional and global change in the climate.   
The Wiley Encyclopedia of Biomedical Engineering
Contains the fundamentals of life, engineering, mathematical, and information sciences with the methodologies and systems of biomedical engineering.  Covers topics such as human performance and reverse engineering, and rehabilitation and orthopedic engineering.
The Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences
Useful for those working in statistics, probability theory, biostatistics, quality control, and economics with emphasis in applications of statistical methods in sociology, engineering, computer science, biomedicine, psychology, survey methodology, and a host of other disciplines. 

The Encyclopedia of Biostatistics , 2nd Edition 
Covers the development and use of statistical methods in the life and medical sciences in eight cross-referenced volumes.  This new edition will find widespread application in basic medical sciences; the planning, financing and distribution of health care; and the measurement of health care status and progress in the population. 

Encyclopedia of Environmental Microbiology 
Addresses the methodology for detection and preventive measure for avoiding or reducing human exposure to harmful agents.  This is a useful resource for microbiologists studying microorganisms and their habitats, and those working in applied research areas such as public health, agriculture, food, and water quality, water or wastewater treatment, or resource recovery. 

Attention SciFinder Scholar Users

IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM CHEMICAL ABSTRACTS SOCIETY  (CAS)

Discontinued Versions of SciFinder Scholar

CAS has notified all SciFinder Scholar Key Contacts that as of January 2, 2008 the following versions of SciFinder Scholar have been discontinued:

SciFinder Scholar 2004.2 (MAC OS 9 and Windows)

SciFinder Scholar MAC OS X 1.0

The above versions are no longer supported.  Also - Please note that CAS no longer supports Macintosh OS 9 as of January 2, 2008.

Please update your version of SciFinder Scholar by visiting the USF Libraries instructions for downloading and accessing SciFinder Scholar:

SciFinder Scholar Installation Instructions 

The following are the most recent versions of SciFinder Scholar that are available for download:

SciFinder Scholar 2007 (Windows and MAC OS X)

If you have questions concerning downloading the latest versions of SciFinder Scholar, please contact Cheryl McCoy  USF Tampa Library - Research Librarian for the Natural Sciences.  For additional assistance, you may also want to contact CAS Customer Care at 1-800-753-4227 or send e-mail to help@cas.org.

Public Access Mandate for NIH Research

PUBLIC ACCESS MANDATE FOR NIH RESEARCH BECOMES LAW
On December 26, 2007, President Bush signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764s) , which includes a provision that directs the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide open online access to all of its federally-funded research findings. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency.

In 2005, the NIH agreed to make research findings available if its researchers agreed to do so, but with this new mandate, all agency-funded investigators will be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of these peer-reviewed articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.

scitopia.org

According to its website scitopia.org offers users a free federated  search service to retrieve the content provided by a number of affiliated scholarly societies, including recently published articles as well as digitized content that goes back as far as 1884

The website also notes that a federated search consists of a real time search through a disparate group of databases. The user enters a set of query parameters, which are broadcast to the selected databases; the results are collated and presented back to the user in a unified format. Federated searching is distinct from the functioning of traditional search engines, which use robots to continuously index and crawl through web-based content, retrieving results from previously cached documents that match the query terms.

Some of the partner societies include: Acoustical Society of America, American Geophysical Union, American Institute of Physics, American Society of Civil Engineers, Optical Society of America, and SPIE.  The website enables users to find newly published research almost immediately and enables easy searching of multiple sites with one search request. Subscribers to the partner society libraries and members of partner societies will be able to view the full text included in their subscriptions or memberships. Other users may access full text through a pay-per-view option.

Science Remains in JSTOR

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the journal Science has decided to reverse course and rejoin JSTOR, the popular online archive of scholarly publications.  Science's decision to withdraw was the subject of much criticism by librarians and others.

SciTechNet

The SciTechNet(sm): Science and Technology Social Networking Services blog was launched on October 31 2007. SciTechNet(sm) is devoted to describing and documenting online social networking services in the Sciences and Technology.

Success! NIH Provision Remains Intact

Librarians are ringing in the New Year with the nation's first ever public access mandate. Both the House of Representatives and Senate approved the revised Labor Health and Human Services (LHHS) appropriations bill which leaves intact a directive for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) requiring investigators to deposit their final papers in PubMed Central. Papers will then be available within a year after publication. The approval caps a several years-long fight spearheaded by SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), to make public access a requirement for NIH grantees.

Let's Talk eBooks...

ScienceDirect is used by millions of scientists to access a quarter of the world's STM journal articles online.  But researchers need quick and reliable access to all relevant discoveries and analysis, whether published in a journal or not. That's why ScienceDirect is talking books!

Find out more about eBooks on ScienceDirect.