Search current issues of 4,500+ technology journals through new service – TechJournalContents

TechJournalContents is a brand new service which lets you to search across the current issues of more than 4,500 scholarly technology journals from multiple publishers, in order to find the latest research articles.

Access to the full text of search results in TechJournalContents will depend on whether the Library subscribes to the journals in question or whether they are freely available through Open Access.  For off-campus access, members of Heriot-Watt University should use the Virtual Private Network to get the full text of subscribed journals. 

If you know about RSS, you can save the results of searches made in TechJournalContents as feeds, and then keep up-to-date with new content via a feedreader of your choice such as Google Reader or Bloglines.

The core behind the service is the journalTOCs API, produced by the journalTOCs Project, which is based at the ICBL, Heriot-Watt University, and is being managed by Santy Chumbe. A project blog is available.

TechJournalContents is made available by TechXtra, a free service produced by the ICBL and Library at Heriot-Watt University.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

New search engine for scholarly papers – Microsoft Academic Search

Microsoft Academic Search beta is a rather interesting new testbed search engine for over 3,000,000 scholarly papers.  Read what ResourceShelf wrote in their review of it, and read about some of its limitations, as described by Karen Blakeman - “It only seems to cover computing and the Internet”.

Find most relevant and top ranked papers by keywords:

Get an aggregated page for a certain paper:

See top ranked paper in a conference/journal:

See all the papers related to a certain author:

Plus, there are features such as the visual explorer, which lets you view links between authors, etc.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian
@libram

search50 – tips for searching

search⁵⁰ lets you complete a keyword search that returns information from a variety of different online sources, much as you would expect from Google. Just enter your chosen search terms in the box and click Search. You can be as general as you like with the terms chosen, but if you’re searching across a wide range of resources you should expect a long list of results, again like Google. Try to focus your search by using the subject categories.

There are some basic steps you can take to conduct a more effective search, and to make sure you retrieve more relevant results.

You can use the drop-down menus to select where search terms appear in your results. The default is Keyword searching, but select All and your results list will include records where your search terms appear anywhere within the record. You can be more specific and look for search terms within defined parts of the record, the Title, Author names, words from the article Abstract or Subject terms.

You can also decide how the search terms are linked together. Select And, Or or Not from the drop-down menus for Boolean Searching. Quite simply, selecting And returns results which include both terms, Or returns results which include one or other of the terms, and Not returns results which include one term but not the other. The default is And.

It’s also possible to truncate, or shorten, your search terms using a question mark – ?. Search for “manag?” and your results will include records containing the words manager, management, managed or managing. You can use the ? within words as well. Search for “organi?ation” and your results will include records containing organization or organisation. search⁵⁰ will also, on occasion, offer you alternative suggestions for search terms on the results page through Did you mean. This can be useful to correct spelling mistakes.

If you need assistance or advice on any aspect of online searching contact the Library, browse through some of our previous postings on this blog, and look out for our information skills workshop sessions.

Iain Young
Resources Manager

search50 – subject based online searching

The Library subscribes to over seven thousand online academic journals and 150 online databases to support learning and teaching, and research at the University. Little wonder knowing which resources to use is a challenge, not to mention how time-consuming it can be to search them all individually.

When you are working on an essay or assignment, or conducting a literature search, search⁵⁰ will let you combine a selection of the Library’s full-text journals, online resources and the Library Catalogue and find lots of different resources online with just one Google-like search.

It’s unlikely that you would ever want to search across all 50 resources, and we wouldn’t recommend it as a search strategy, so we have made it easy for you to select those most relevant to your subject. Check the box next to a subject category and all resources covering that subject will be selected for searching. It’s possible to combine subjects if required. You can also click on the subject category and be taken to a page listing only those resources relevant to that subject.

Where we see the true benefit of search⁵⁰ is as an excellent starting point, especially if you don’t know where to begin searching for a topic. If you know which resources you’ve found most useful in the past you can check the box next to them in the resource list and define your own combinations. For more sophisticated and flexible searching you’ll want to go through the individual database interfaces. You can do this by clicking on the resource name in the list. We will continue to support our Databases and Journals pages on the Library website for information on, and access to, the full range of resources available from the Library.

If you need assistance or advice on any aspect of online searching contact the Library, and look out for our information skills workshop sessions.

Iain Young
Resources Manager

search50 – searching across online resources

 

A new service from the Library will make it easier to search our electronic resources. Now you can search across the most useful 50 online resources, and be provided with a merged list of results, through search⁵⁰

search⁵⁰ provides coverage of all subjects taught in the University, and resources have been selected by our Subject Librarians for their relevance. You can select from 50 resources, and search either individually or by subject category. It’s important to realise that not all databases are included in search⁵⁰.  Whilst search⁵⁰ doesn’t offer the sophisticated and flexible searching available through the individual database interfaces, it’s an excellent starting point, especially if you don’t know where to begin searching for a topic.

search⁵⁰ is available both on and off campus. You will be prompted to log-in using your University ID and password, just as you would log-in to HW Webmail. Links can be accessed from results displays to take you directly to full text articles, where these are available. Search results can also be printed, or saved directly into EndNote.

If you have any questions or comments regarding any aspect of search⁵⁰ please contact the Library. We will continue to refine and improve this service and would welcome your input. More information on search⁵⁰ will be posted here on spineless? through the week.

Iain Young
Resources Manager

How to find patents and patent information

 
What are patents?

A patent is a legal document which gives its owner the right to stop others from copying, manufacturing, selling, and importing their invention without their permission. Patents therefore protect the features and processes that make things work.  Patents can be a vital source of technical information.

Heriot-Watt University Library does not hold many patents.  Those that we have can be found via the Catalogue.  However, our Inter-Library Loans service can obtain copies of most patents where the full text is not available from the services listed below.

Finding patents

Various services can be used for finding patents:

GB Esp@cenet covers all GB applications published by the Intellectual Property Office under the Patents Act 1977, plus GB patents granted by the Intellectual Property Office since June 2002.  The GB database is one of a number of databases available through Esp@cenet through which patents from Europe and WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), and information about patents worldwide, are available.
 

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) produces the Patent Full-Text and Full- Page Image Database.  Coverage is from 1790 onwards for issued US Patents, full-text from 1976 onwards.  Google Patents also searches information from the USPTO.
 

Patent Lens is a worldwide, open-access, free full-text patent informatics resource.
 

Other search services include Patents.com,  Boliven Patent Search, FreePatentsOnline search service, WikiPatents,  TechXtra Patents and Standards Search, and Scirus Advanced Search which includes a filter for patent searching.
 

Patent Pal makes available a toolbar containing over 30 unique patent related searches and other features.  You can download this toolbar to your browser.

Further information on patents

More information about patents is available from the Intellectual Property Office.  The British Library’s Help for Researchers: Patents site is also a good source of information about patents. The European Patent Office has guides to patents.  PatentScope is the WIPO guide to using patent information.  Other sources of information about patents include Intellogist, which is hosted by Landon IP, a global leader in professional patent searching.

The World Patent Report: A Statistical Review is produced by the World Intellectual Property Organization.

The Intellectual Property Office publish IP Insight, a free monthly e-newsletter.  World Patent Information is a journal about Industrial Property information and documentation.

Some books about patents are available in the Library, for example: How to find information: patents on the internet, by David Newton, and Intellectual property: patents, copyright, trade marks and allied rights, by William Cornish and David Llewelyn.  

The Patent Librarian’s Notebook is a useful blog by Michael White, a librarian from Ontario, and The Patent Search Blog is published by Steve van Dulken, from the Biritsh Library.

Some more possible sources will be found in the Comments to this post.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

Ten science search engines – update

It’s almost exactly a year since the post Ten Science Search Engines appeared on this blog.  I can tell from the stats that that post has been amazingly popular, so maybe it’s time for an update.

The initial list of science search engines remains the same:

• Scirus
• Scitopia.org
• Science.gov
• Science Research
• Scitation
• WorldWideScience.org
• Science Accelerator
• TechXtra
• search.optics.org

But of course, there are only nine listed above.  Suggestions for the tenth, via comments on the original post, include GoPubMed (a search engine for the life sciences), VADLO (for biomedical and life sciences), novo|seek (for biomedical literature), and IEEE Xplore (for electrical engineering, computer science, and electronics).  IEEE Xplore is not free, but Heriot-Watt University Library subscribes to it.

Of the original nine science search engines in the list:

• Scirus now indexes the journal collection from three more publishers and has added 27 new institutional repositories to those searched.
• Scitopia.org now provides an alerting feature and has a browser plug-in.
• Science.gov now searches over 40 databases and 1,950 selected websites, offering 200 million pages of U.S. government science information, including research and development results.
• Science Research now reckons to be the world’s most comprehensive Deep Web science search engine, providing a single point of access to over 400 high-quality publicly searchable science and technology collections.
• Scitation has some quite detailed news items about its content.
• WorldWideScience.org has just expanded its coverage by adding Environment Research Funders’ Forum (ERFF) Research Database to its list of databases searched.  Other recent additions include KoreaMed and The International Science and Technology Center (ISTC).
• Science Accelerator has an archive of news about the service.
• TechXtra made numerous improvements to its service, including the addition of full text indicators to search results pages in an attempt to show the likely availability of full text.
• search.optics.org now has a toolbar you can download for Internet Explorer.

More searchable databases are listed on our Databases and other electronic resources pages.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian 

Major improvements to TechXtra search service for engineering, maths and computing

TechXtra, one of the Ten science search engines I mentioned a while back on this blog, has recently been improved.

TechXtra is a free service provided by the ICBL and Library at Heriot-Watt University.  Using TechXtra you can find articles, books, the best websites, the latest industry news, job announcements, technical reports, technical data, full text eprints, the latest research, theses & dissertations, teaching and learning resources and more, in engineering, mathematics and computing.  TechXtra searches over 4 million items from 31 collections in technology, and provides several additional services.

For full details of the improvements, please see the TechXtra News Blog.  Changes include:

• New full text indicators on search results pages, which show the likely availability of full text.
• Faster searching of the Arrow and CISTI databases, where you can find Australian and Canadian research.
• Updated RAM (Recent Advances in Manufacturing) database.
• Over 100 new sources of job announcements and industry news in the OneStep Jobs and OneStep Industry News services.
• A new TechXtra SRU service.
• More free magazine subscriptions.

Further collections will be added to TechXtra in the future.  Details will be announced on the  TechXtra News Blog.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

New search engine from Microsoft – Bing

Microsoft recently made available a new search engine called Bing.  It’s been getting mixed reports in the media.  Two of the sources I rely on for expert and impartial reviews of search engines were not very positive at all.  Phil Bradley reported: It’s awful, and Karen Blakeman said: Don’t bother.  Elsewhere, some reviews have been more positive.

About.com has a helpful screenshot walk-through, which is a useful way of getting an overview.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

Something new – WolframAlpha

 

As it’s been in the news quite a lot, you may have noticed a new website called WolframAlpha.  “Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone.”

From the FAQ: 

Is Wolfram|Alpha a search engine?
No. It’s a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.

Is Wolfram|Alpha free to use?
Yes, it’s free for personal noncommercial use as described in its Terms of Use. Subscriptions will be available in the near future with enhanced features for large-scale and commercial use.

Who is Wolfram|Alpha for?
Everyone! Its goal is to bring expert-level knowledge to everybody.

See real time tweets about the new service, and for a brief review of it, read what Karen Blakeman writes on her blog.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian