Math Library News

MathSciNet now includes Preliminary Data for quicker access to citations

MathSciNet now includes Preliminary Data items, which are created from bibliographic data received directly from publishers. This data allows users to view early information about new papers in mathematics while full processing, including author identification and editorial decisions, is ongoing.

Preliminary Data items are marked as such until processing is complete. The initial group of publishers who have agreed to provide preliminary data feeds includes the American Mathematical Society, the Canadian Mathematical Society, the European Mathematical Society, the Mathematical Association of America, SIAM, Elsevier, and Springer.

More information and detailed descriptions of Preliminary Data and other item tags.

Miscellaneous interesting links

http://ed.ted.com/ (BETA) is already offering a few ideas which might be relevant to mathematics and statistics teaching. Flip this lesson! A new way to teach with video from TED-Ed

You've signed on to the Boycott, now what? A SPARC Guide for Campus Action: http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/sparc_boycott_next_steps.pdf OR http://www.arl.org/sparc/media/signed-the-boycott-now-what.shtml

Open sesame: When research is funded by the taxpayer or by charities, the results should be available to all without charge Economist editorial, Apr 14th 2012, with lots of comments

Search tip for HathiTrust: When a Simple Search Just Won't Do How to search for a word or phrase within the works of a particular author.

Just for fun: Mathematical sweater

New access: Mathematics Teacher, Revista Matematica IberoAmericana and Scopus

Mathematics Teacher
(1908-1922; 2006- )

Our access to Revista Matemática Iberoamericana has been restored. It was interrupted when the publisher changed and holdings closed at Project Euclid.
(1985 - )

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. It offers sophisticated tools to track, analyze and visualize research. Scopus is somewhat 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. My initial trials in Scopus lead me to believe it may have better mathematics coverage than Web of Science, at least it includes pre-publication citations that you will not find in other search tools.

European Digital Mathematics Library

European Digital Mathematics Library EuDML beta site is now available for searching. In addition to bringing together digitized collections from all over Europe, there is a useful search engine for specific articles, including mathematical formula search and other tools. Check it out! www.eudml.eu or www.eudml.org

Miscellaneous notes and links: MathSciNet, NY Review of Books, HathiTrust

MathSciNet tutorials are now available at http://www.mathscinet.info/index.html. Tutorials include - Publications, Authors, Journals, and Citations searches - as well as tutorials on the Free Tools and Preferences options. Every user will find new features and search options that will enhance their use of the database. I learned a few things going through these files!

We now have access to the New York Review of Books, 1963+. Although not strictly a math source, it will be a handy source to read popular book reviews and essays including ones that mention mathematics. Reviews are keyword searchable. Enjoy!

HathiTrust ability to download fulltext books from HathiTrust is coming to WUSTL, January, 2012.

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."

Recent dissertations and theses

We've been slowly making the transition to online (instead of paper) PhD dissertations and Masters theses.

• They are made available at http://digital.wustl.edu/etd/. Fulltext is available within a few months of submission unless an embargo has been set by the author. One problem with this system is that when you search by Department for "mathematics," you also get Systems Science & Mathematics. I don't expect major improvements in this system for several months but it is usable, just a bit clunky.
• Eventually information and links appear in the WU Catalog also. EXAMPLE in Catalog
• MathSciNet does include PHD dissertations but they are not searchable by institution and they are not loaded very quickly.
• The fastest/best way to get WU PHD dissertations is probably the Dissertations & Theses @ Washington University in St. Louis database; this also has the most flexible search features and allows search by academic advisor; it does NOT include Masters theses. The only source for WU Masters theses is http://digital.wustl.edu/etd/.

These are the math dissertations and theses I currently find in the WU ETD system:

Title: Connections between Floer-type invariants and Morse-type invariants of Legendrian knotsa. Author: Henry, Michael Ph.D.Mathematics 2009 MR2713488.

Title: Equivariant Deformations of Horospherical Surfaces Author: Deutsch, Michael Ph.D.Mathematics 2010 MR2736771.

Title: EXAMINING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF MULTIPLE IMPUTATION: A CASE STUDY ON HIV RISK BEHAVIORS IN WOMEN RECEIVING TREATMENT FOR SUBSTANCE USE DISORDERS Author: Murden, Raphiel Masters Mathematics 2011

Title: Filling Essential Laminations Author: Hamm, Michael Ph.D.Mathematics 2009 MR2713560.

Title: Markov Chains Derived From Lagrangian Mechanical Systems Author: Cook, Scott Ph.D.Mathematics 2011

Title: On Bayesian Regression Regularization Methods Author: Li, Qing Ph.D.Mathematics 2010 MR2822000.

Title: Predictive Alternatives in Bayesian Model Selection Author: Womack, Andrew Ph.D.Mathematics 2011

Title: Properties of truncated Toeplitz operators Author: Sedlock, Nicholas Ph.D.Mathematics 2010 MR2736740.

Title: Statistical Aggregation: Theory and Applications Author: Xi, Ruibin Ph.D.Mathematics 2009 MR2713334.

Title: The Boundary Behavior of Holomorphic Functions Author: Min, Baili Ph.D.Mathematics 2011

Title: The Nonexistence of Shearlet-Like Scaling Multifunctions that Satisfy Certain Minimally Desirable Properties and Characterizations of the Reproducing Properties of the Integer Lattice Translations of a Countable Collection of Square Integrable Functions Author: Houska, Robert Ph.D.Mathematics 2009 MR2713543.

Title: USING DIRICHLET PROCESS PRIORS FOR BAYESIAN MIXTURE CLUSTERING Author: Huang, Xiao Ph.D.Mathematics 2011

I will try to post updates to this blog periodically. Meanwhile, if you have questions, please ask Ruth.

Fulltext access to NTIS reports added

NTIS/NTRL (National Technical Reports Library)
'The National Technical Information Service acquires, indexes, abstracts, and archives the largest collection of U.S. government-sponsored technical reports in existence. The NTRL offers access to these authenticated government technical reports to libraries and technical information users.' This is a subscription site that includes indexing for 2 million+ titles with links to over 600,000 full-text reports (in PDF). More info.

NTIS publishes documents in many subject areas but is not generally considered an index to mathematics literature. However, many reports each month are tagged as "mathematics." Recent Mathematics reports. Search titles in the new NTIS/NTRL library to get to fulltext or search words in Advanced Search in NTIS/NTRL library and then limit by Subject Category: Mathematics.

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/.
There are currently 562 titles included in the Mathematics subject list and 136 titles in the Statistics list.

MathSciNet now uses MathJax and includes PhD dissertations

The American Mathematical Society has been a sponsor of MathJax, open source software for displaying mathematical notation in modern browsers. As of October 12, MathSciNet is now using this.

• More info with example links [scroll down to What's New Oct. 12, 2010]
• MathJax demos page

Thanks to Drexelmath for the tip!

PhD dissertations are now included in MathSciNet also however they are only retrieved by author or author-related searches. WU example: MR2713386.