Biology Library News

Search tips and science tools

• We have a lovely new interface for Statistical Abstract of the U.S. | Quick Start Guide from Proquest
• Many short tutorials for PubMed and other NCBI tools are available on the NCBI YouTube Channel. One of my favorites is the 3 minute tutorial Use MeSH to Build a Better PubMed Query.
• Translational Bioinformatics (PLOS Collection) | Elements of Bioinformatics, a periodic table of tools | Resources to speed the R learning curve | all from Bioinformatics@Becker blog.
• Also useful? Learn R with Twotorials (ProfHacker) | How to Download Bacterial Genomes Using the Entrez API | Poster in my Pocket (free app from Elsevier)
• History of science, technology and medicine is now available on EbscoHost. An added feature of this platform is that you can "Choose Databases" (such as America: History and Life, Historical Abstracts and/or Medline) to add and search several databases all at the same time.

EJournals and Databases added in December, 2012

BioResearch

Full text, v.1, 2012+; Open Access; Mary Ann Liebert.

Chronicle of Higher Education

Full text, 1989+; WU access only. [Our trial access turns into a campus-wide subscription in 2013. Campuswide: What's Included?; includes the annual Almanac of Higher Education, 1995+.]

Journal of Radiation Research

Full text, 53(4), 2012+; Open Access; Oxford University Press

Journal of Radiation Research

Full text, v.1-53(3), 1960-2012; freely available; J-Stage.

Openi, an open access biomedical image search engine

TimeTree compares all taxa in one inclusive group (e.g., Feliformia) with those in the other group (e.g., Caniformia) to find all published times of divergence for the evolutionary split.

How can I link to fulltext from PubMed since I don't see a Get It! button?

How can I link to fulltext from PubMed since I don't see a Get It! button? I receive this and related questions fairly often so I've posted a few ideas in our Ask Us! faq. Also I have read some reports about problems logging in to My NCBI this month, but I haven't received any from folks at WUSTL; it seems that NCBI did something to their website recently which caused problems with some browsers. I hope it is working OK for you

PubMed Central Images Search and PubMed Results by Year Display

These features now display on the right side of results screens in PubMed searches. I think the PMC Image Search may be especially useful for quickly locating tables and other images in freely available articles. See info from NLM Technical Bulletin for a short description and picture.

PubMed Changes

There have been a few changes in PubMed recently. These seem like good changes that are fairly self-explanatory but I thought I would alert you to the changes.
    -- PubMed Filters Sidebar Replaces the Limits Page (NLM Technical Bulletin) See also: PubMed: The Filters Sidebar (2 minute You Tube video)
    -- PubMed and Computed Author Sorted Display I have found this useful for Ken Olsen publications already, although it isn't perfect. Authors with non-unique last name-initals will continue to be a problem, but PubMed is beginning to work on this gnarly issue.
    -- PubMed Results and Citation Manager Software PubMed simplified the exporting of references to Endnote and perhaps other Bibliographic management packages. Previously when you had identified the references you wanted to export you had to go through a number of steps to get your references out of Pubmed. Now all you have to do is click on the Send to menu at the top of your list of references, select the option for citation manager and then click on the create file button. This will save an ".nbib" file to you computer which you can import.

Scopus now available to all of WUSTL

Exciting news! The entire campus now has access to Scopus, a multidisciplinary database, the "world’s largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature." It contains over 46 million records, 70% with abstracts, and also includes over 4.6 million conference papers. Although strongest in science and technology, there is significant coverage in arts & humanities and social sciences. Scopus includes all of Medline, 1949 to present. It offers sophisticated tools to track, analyze and visualize research. (For many years, this has been a database only available to medical campus users and Danforth campus users who trek down to the medical campus.) Scopus is probably most similar to Web of Science. It includes cited and citing references, h-factor calculations and several other analysis tools. For some disciplines, source documents may go back to 1960; in Web of Science we have 1970+. Of course older articles can be found in both tools when they are cited by newer articles. In my opinion, Scopus may be better than Web of Science for author searching because it is better, not perfect, at disambiguation of authors with similar names. Author name disambiguation is a difficult problem, especially important when you analyze impact, etc. Scopus includes SciImago Journal Rank and SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) for its sources. There are many tutorials available, for Sciverse (which includes ScienceDirect, Scopus and web searching) and for Scopus. I welcome your questions and comments as we all begin to use and assess this new tool.

Links to availability at WU Becker Medical Library

Get it! buttons, which are found in most databases, now include an option to "Check if this is available from the Becker Medical Library" when we do not have fulltext online access in the Get it! menu. If you are using databases from Becker Library, their Get It@Becker buttons also include an option to "Check if this is available from the Danforth Campus Libraries."

Get it! with Pubmed: To have Get it! buttons in PubMed you need to use a link from a library web page. For locating fulltext from PubMed, I recommend the publisher's link/graphic first and the green Get It! or red Get It@Becker buttons second. Personally I like to have BOTH buttons by using My NCBI with Outside Tool Preference set to "Washington Univ. in St. Louis, Danforth Campus" AND Linkout icon set to "Washington University Medical School Becker Library, MO." MY NCBI has other features, such as saved searches. More info about My NCBI.

Eresources added for biology, August, 2011

Embryo Project Encyclopedia, a project of Arizona State University, supported by the National Science Foundation and the Max Planck Institute among others. The aim of the project is to "identify and understand the agents of change shaping embryo research and its multiple contexts."

Epigenetics

Full text, v.1, 2006+ ; WU access only; Landes Bioscience, due to Becker Library subscription.

Laboratory Animal Research

Full text, v.27, 2011+; freely available; PubMed Central.

Nature Communications

Full text, v.1, 2010+; WU access only; many articles are freely available; Nature. [Becker Medical Library pays for this access.]

Adam R. Navis, "Viktor Hamburger", Embryo Project Encyclopedia (2007) ISSN: 1940-5030. [includes links to short referenced articles about related people and terms]

JournalTOCS

JournalTOCs, the largest, free collection of scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs) has been redesigned a bit. You may want to check it out in case it would be useful for your current awareness needs: http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/.

Search tips: My NCBI, Web of Science, LigerCat, Get it!

    - New tutorials about the Get it! Button are now available: http://libguides.wustl.edu/get_it. Use Get It! to access fulltext content or request articles when we don't have them online or in paper.
    - My NCBI has been redesigned. More info | 2 minute video tutorial. My NCBI is one way to ensure that you have WU Get it! buttons available when you search PubMed, set up search alerts and saved searches, etc.
    - LigerCat isn't new but I think it's worth mentioning occasionally. This is a special interface to PubMed which allows display of occurrence-weighted tag [MeSH heading]clouds [MeSH headings]. LigerCat also has a publication data histogram feature. More info.
    - PubMed and beyond: a survey of web tools for searching biomedical literature compares 28 PubMed derivatives. (Open access article from Database 2011 doi: 10.1093/database/baq036) PubMed derivatives at a glance: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/CBBresearch/Lu/search/
    - For a preview of the new Web of Science interface, click on "DISCOVER the new Web of Knowledge now!" on the upper right. Improvements will include left hand truncation of search terms, full author name searching (instead of reliance on initials), automatic searching for institutional name variants, and much more. Full implementation is expected in July.