Friday, July 29, 2005

Expanded Years for Science Citation Index

The Science Citation Index (from the Web of Science) is now online from 1900 to the present. You can search for early 20th Century articles written by such notables as Albert Einstein, Alexander Fleming and Marie Curie and retrieve article citation data. This added coverage is from 262 journals published between 1900 to 1944 and a full journal list is available.

FYI
Web of Science is listed under Major Resources on the Library's home page.

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Web of Science: Results Analysis

Have you explored the Results Analysis feature in the Web of Science?

The results analysis extracts data values from a field you select and then produces a report showing the values in ranked order.

For example, suppose you search Web of Science for articles about conjunctivitis in children. You could use this feature to generate a list of authors who published articles on that subject. The authors who published the largest number of articles would be at the top of the list.

Some of the other ways to analyze the results are by: institution, country/territory, document type, institution name, language, publication year, source title, and subject category.

To perform a results analysis, click the Analyze button on any Summary Results page to go to the Results Analysis page.

Check it out!

Monday, July 25, 2005

PubMed search terms highlighted

Well, this is pretty cool.

On July 19, PubMed added a highlighting feature that will help you find just where your search terms are. Search terms will be highlighted in pale yellow in the Summary, Abstract, and Citation display formats.

Highlighted terms will include your search terms as well as terms that have been added by PubMed to enhance your search. Check out the 'Details' tab to see how PubMed translated your terms.

Highlighting must be turned on in My NCBI and is only active when you are signed into My NCBI. Register/Sign in to My NCBI and click on User Preferences on the My NCBI sidebar. The default will be "Off." Selecting a color and clicking OK activates this feature.

For more information about this see the NLM Technical Bulletin. All the details and more...

Thursday, July 21, 2005

Web of Science: cited reference searching

For my example, I want to see who has cited the following article since it was published in 1994:

Tinetti ME, Baker DI, McAvay G, Claus EB, Garrett P, Gottschalk M, Koch ML, Trainor K, Horwitz RI. A multifactorial intervention to reduce the risk of falling among elderly people living in the community. N Engl J Med. 1994, 331(13):821-7.

From the Major Resources scan column on the Library's web page, click on "Web of Science". Click on 'Cited Reference Searching'.

In the Cited Author box, enter the author's last name and initials:
tinetti m* [* is the truncation symbol]

In the Cited Year box, enter the year:
1994

Click on the SEARCH button.

The next screen displays all of the works by tinetti m* in 1994 sorted alphabetically by cited work. We're looking for the article in the New England Journal of Medicine and you can see that articles in that journal begin about halfway down the page.

Here's a segment of what that looks like:


I've highlighted the article with a red box. Notice the 627 in the 'Times Cited' column and that other entries above and below this one seem to be for the same citation. Looking closely you'll see that the problem is mostly with different page numbers. This usually means that some authors could be a tad more careful in typing or proofreading their bibliographies.

Click on 'View Record' (on the far right) to view the full record details including the bibliographic information, abstract, author addresses and more. But the most important bits on the full record screen are the 'cited references' and the 'times cited' links.



The 'Cited References' are the references that ME Tinetti cited in this article -- in other words, her reference list for this article. The 'Times Cited' are the articles that have cited this one in their reference lists since it was published in 1994.

Give this a try with an article that you know and love. Explore some of the other links!

Tips
If you're wondering why I didn't enter the journal title in the 'Cited Work' box, it's because it's too time consuming to find the 'right' journal abbreviation. I always start with the author and the year - if the author is prolific in that year then I begrudgingly use the tools to find the 'right' abbreviation for the journal. MEDLINE users know the New England Journal of Medicine as N Engl J Med but in the WoS, it's New Engl J Med. A painful lesson...

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

More about comparisons

A comment on yesterday's entry asked "So, is there overlap between the databases? Is scopus the best, based on this? Or does web of science and google have uniques hits?"

This is a great question - one that I had myself immediately after I did this test (along with lots of other questions!). But, I can't answer it definitively...yet. Because of this little test, several colleagues and I are going to take a look at the resulting sets of cited references and do some in-depth comparisons. I'll report back when that's completed.

That said, however, I think that looking at what the three databases cover just in terms of types of materials, dates covered, total number of items indexed/covered then a clearer picture emerges of how and where the differences might occur. This chart takes information directly from each product's web site and gives only a superficial look at what's really under the hood. Notice that Google Scholar is not at all forthcoming about the depth and breadth of what material they are covering.

It may be that you won't be able to select a 'best' resource for cited reference searching and that depending on your discipline and the purpose for your cited reference search, you might end up using multiple resources to get the best result.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Cited reference searching: comparisons

I thought it would be interesting to look at how Google Scholar, the Web of Science, and SCOPUS fared in head-to-head competition in cited reference searching. For an explanation of cited reference searching see Cited Reference Searching (July 6).

I chose four articles by Yale School of Medicine authors and using each of the three databases, looked at the 'times cited' or 'cited by' fields. I compared the numbers in the chart below.




If you're wondering what that number in parentheses on the Web of Science line is for, it simply indicates how many people cited the article incorrectly... in most cases the page number was slightly off.

FYI
Here's the deets for the four articles:

Inzucchi SE. Oral antihyperglycemic therapy for type 2 diabetes: scientific review. JAMA. 2002, 287(3):360-372.

Kazdin AE, Weisz JR. Identifying and developing empirically supported child and adolescent treatments. J Consult Clin Psychol. 1998, 27(2):217-36.

Mellman I, Steinman RM. Dendritic cells: specialized and regulated antigen processing machines. Cell. 2001, 106(3):255-8.

Tinetti ME, Baker DI, McAvay G, Claus EB, Garrett P, Gottschalk M, Koch ML, Trainor K, Horwitz RI. A multifactorial intervention to reduce the risk of falling among elderly people living in the community. N Engl J Med. 1994, 331(13):821-7.

Monday, July 18, 2005

Search Tips Blog is back!

That is, the blogger herself is back.

I've been on vacation on and off for the last six weeks but I'm back now and ready to 'tip' away...

Thanks to Judy Spak, who both guest blogged and entry-posted while I was away!

Thursday, July 07, 2005

Image Resources for Teaching

Judy Spak, Curriculum Support Librarian, has created a great new resource page which includes commercial biomedical image databases (restricted access), Yale image resources, and a compilation of general image directories and databases.

FYI
Image Resources for Teaching

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Cited Reference Searching

Cited reference searching is different than subject searching in that this technique allows you follow the evolution of a topic forward and backward in time. Here's how it works...

You've started your search for information and have located an article written in 1995 that seems to be almost perfect but it's a tad old. Wouldn't it be helpful if you could identify articles that have cited this wonderful article since it was written in 1995? Using the technique 0f cited reference searching, you can accomplish this fairly simply.

The logic behind cited reference searching is that an author cites articles that are related to his.

Some of the reasons why an author might cite another article are that it might:
  • provide part of the context in which the current paper is being written or is another aspect of the same topic
  • represent an earlier stage in research or thinking which is explored further in the current paper
  • provide a technique or procedure used in the current study
  • state something that the author of the current paper would like to refute
In other words, you can watch a topic evolve...not to mention that you can check out how many times your own articles have been cited.

There are many resources that provide cited reference searching but the gold standards are Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index from the Web of Science.

CINAHL and PsycINFO are two other databases that have been adding cited references to each article record for several years (more about that in future posts!). SCOPUS, a new product for our library, offers cited reference analysis and Google Scholar allows a form of cited reference searching.

Watch for some comparisons in upcoming posts!

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

New! Journal Citation Reports 2004 data

Thomson Scientific just announced that the 2004 data is now available for Journal Citation Reports.

Enhancements include more category level analysis: much of the same statistical information available for individual journals is now available for journal categories, for data from 2003 forward. This provides a view of coverage, citation behavior and relationships across an entire subject. Cited Category and Citing Category lists show the most frequently cited journals in the subject. This information helps put a journal's impact factor into context.

FYI
See previous post on JCR.