Information Science
cpikas | February 8, 2010A brief note. Remember when I told you about free to you research databases? Remember when some other librarians told you about a certain company negotiating for exclusive access to certain popular magazines, choking out other aggregators? Well, now these two things have something in common. Ebsco.
cpikas | February 7, 2010At the PSP Pre-Conference (see my notes), Dr. Harley of the Higher Education in the Digital Age program reported being surprised by their finding that young scholars were unwilling or unlikely to experiment with new scholarly communication (tools/practices/channels). There was a question from the audience that showed the person's disbelief of this finding. No matter how many times this myth is debunked, it remains firmly entrenched. Here are some variations on it:
when generation {x,y, millennial, etc} gets in {university, grad school, the workplace}, {collaboration, communication, search…
grrlscientist | January 22, 2010tags: How It's Made: Toothpicks, material science, engineering, technology, streaming video
This video follows a majestic birch log as it goes through the process of being made into millions of itty bitty toothpicks.
cpikas | January 16, 2010This is a session by Stephanie Willen Brown and Dorothea Salo .
They started with a bunch of questions. About half the room was librarians, of the others split between affiliated with an institution and not. Where do you go for full text? Google, Google Scholar. Does that work? Sometimes - if not quick if not free to me then move on.
See if your state library has research databases - like NClive, iConn. Contact one of us and we'll put you in contact with someone local.
Come ask your librarian if you need help with anything - even if they don't already provide that service, you help them with…
grrlscientist | January 14, 2010tags: How it's Made: Aluminum Foil, aluminum, material science, chemistry, technology, streaming video
The video shows the process of producing everyday use aluminum foil from huge, raw aluminum ingots.
cpikas | January 9, 2010In most of the discussions of using usage as a metric of scholarly impact, the example of the clinician is given. The example goes that medical articles might be heavily used and indeed have a huge impact on practice (saving lives), but be uncited. There are other fields that have practitioners who pull from the literature, but do not contribute to it.
So it was with interest that I read this new article by the MacRoberts:
MacRoberts, M., & MacRoberts, B. (2009). Problems of citation analysis: A study of uncited and seldom-cited influences Journal of the American Society for…
grrlscientist | January 8, 2010tags: How it's Made: Snowboards, snowboards, sports, engineering, material science, technology, streaming video
This video describes in detail something that winter sports enthusiasts care about during this time of year!
cpikas | January 8, 2010We're just about set for a fabulous session on citation/bibliographic/reference managers at the upcoming Science Online conference. The session wiki page is here, so you can hop over there an add questions or suggestions if you'd like.
John Dupuis and I are moderating and we'll have the following folks there talk about some of the most popular options:
Kevin Emamy (CiteULike)
Jason Hoyt (Mendeley)
Trevor Owens (Zotero)
Michael Habib (2Collab)
John has a lot of experience with EndNote and we both have a lot of experience with RefWorks.
The main point, though, is to have a great conversation…
cpikas | December 31, 2009In the past few years a number of large electronic resources have gone through rather dramatic interface changes - mostly for the better, mostly desperately needed. Some typical things added are faceted presentation of search results, more personalization options, better ways to save and share items, cleaner design, green. I don't know why but everyone is changing their logo and site theme to some combination of green (kelly or lime), orange, and blue.(ok, I can't wait for this phase to be over!). We could talk about the various qualities of each of these design choices, but instead, I want…
grrlscientist | December 30, 2009tags: How It's Made: Bread, baking, agriculture, chemistry, food science, technology, streaming video
This interesting video shows how bread is made in large, mechanized factories: from mixing the ingredients to shipping it out for consumption.
milhayser | December 28, 2009On Collective Imagination, Joe Salvo declares the Information Age is done for, writing: "a period of history can be characterized by the dominant technology that separates the leaders from the followers." He believes humanity has approached a tipping point where the separation between leaders and followers will cease to exist, as the internet democratizes the planet and good information becomes ubiquitous. So what's up next? Salvo calls it a "Systems Age," which involves "sensing, collecting, and manipulating data in near real-time with little to no human supervision." Sounds like a lot of…
cpikas | December 17, 2009One thing that kind of bugs me is that people answer the question "what impact has your funding had" with things like "I hired 3 postdocs and 2 support staff." Dr Lane talked about this at the workshop, but to some extent, I don't think her solution actually got at the bigger problem: societal impact. How has your research - done with our money - made the world a better place (maybe it hasn't, but that's ok, too). In the last post I mentioned a way I think we could start to learn more about how much scientific articles were taken up in the general media. This is at least opportunity for…
cpikas | December 17, 2009One of the open problems in article level metrics is how to automate, quantify, and describe the exposure an article has had in popular science pieces in newspapers and general science magazines. Peter Binfield (PLoS) and Alexis-Michel Mugabushaka. (European Research Council) both brought this up at the NSF Workshop I attended yesterday.
I agree that this is needed. The old models of communication in science that either describe scholarly communication among scientists or popular communication with non-scientists are not enough. Lewenstein [1] and Paul [2] (among others) each describe…
cpikas | December 17, 2009stream of consciousness notes from this meeting I attended in DC, Wednesday December 16, 2009
Final panel
Oren Beit-Arie (Ex Libris Group), Todd Carpenter (NISO),Lorcan Dempsey (OCLC),Tony Hey (Microsoft Research),Clifford Lynch (CNI),Don Waters (Andrew W. Mellon foundation)
introduction from Cliff Lynch - gets requests for tenure reviews - he takes these very seriously. Got one that had a whole bibliometric survey of the work - with all of the citing papers, etc., about 40 pages. Things that were intended to provide insight are now used for evaluation.
Could we get access streams/patterns…
cpikas | December 17, 2009Continuing stream of consciousness notes from this workshop held in DC, Wednesday December 16, 2009
Alexis-Michel Mugabushaka. (European Research Council) - intertwined research funding structures at national and European level.
At the national level two main funding modes - institutional (block research funding of higher ed institutions), and competitive.
Orgs structured at European level - like CERN or EMBL. Joint research funding ESF or bi or multilateral. Research Frameworks. ERC
ERC Scientific Council - 22 eminent scientists. Executive Agency (where he works). 2 programs: starting grants…
cpikas | December 17, 2009this continues my stream of consciousness notes from the workshop held in DC, December 16, 2009.
Peter Binfield (PLOS) - article level metrics. Not talking about OA, not talking about journal level. Journal is just packaging, and shouldn't necessarily judge articles by the packaging. PLoS ONE has half a percent to all the publications that appear in PubMed.
Evaluating an article after publication instead of before so article level metrics are of interest. JIF measures the journal and not the article (or the person). Some things that could be used: citations, web usage, expert ratings, social…
cpikas | December 17, 2009Continuing my stream of consciousness notes from this meeting in DC, Wednesday, December 16, 2009.
Jevin D West (U Washington, Eigenfactor) - biology and bibliometrics. biology has a lot of problems that are studied looking at networks. From ecosystems to genomes. They want to take these huge networks and be able to tell stories. The citation network is a model for information flow that they can then use in biology. WoS 8k journals, 15 years, 60M citations. Goals of eigenfactor: develop tools to comprehend large networks in all areas of science - employ these tools to understand scholarly…
cpikas | December 17, 2009I attended this one-day workshop in DC on Wednesday, December 16, 2009. These are stream of consciousness notes.
Herbert Van de Sompel (LANL) - intro - Lots of metrics: some accepted in some areas and not others, some widely available on platforms in the information industry and others not. How are these metrics selected? Why are some more attractive than others?
Two other points: informal science communication on the web - it's being adopted rapidly - scholars immediately reap the benefits. Lots of metrics: views, downloads, "favorites", followers. So our current metrics are impoverished (…
cpikas | December 10, 2009I've weighed in a few times on how to build online communities or support scientists online, but it's really worth paying attention to when you get an actual scientist who is also very involved in and interested in social software tell you what he thinks. Cameron Neylon did just that in a recent blog post (comments on ff). I'll quote liberally from his blog and feedback some ideas.
(he uses SS4S to stand for social software for science) All of the numbered paragraphs are direct quotes from his post.
1. SS4S will promote engagement with online scientific objects and through this encourage and…
cpikas | December 6, 2009In "common parlance" we throw around chemistry, biology, physics, and all, sort of throwing off the diversity within these disciplines. Gosh, in my comps I answered (or attempted to answer) a question about how useful it was to talk about "scientists" and non-scientists. Going the other way, I'll frequently discuss "research areas" or "invisible colleges" (Price [a] and of course Crane[b]*) or even some of the other groupings of scientists:
lab/university/organization
social circle [c]
paradigm (Kuhn) [d]
epistemic culture (Knorr Cetina)[e]
thought collective (Fleck)[f]
core set (Collins…