Transcript Slide 1
Transportation research
Fall 2011
Engineering & Computer Science Library
Cristina Sewerin
outline
review: major search tools & databases
recent changes
citation searching
journal impact factors
alerting systems, bibliographic management systems
your questions & recommendations
Guide to library materials in transportation:
http://link.library.utoronto.ca/MyUTL/guides/index.cfm?guide=transportation
Article databases
Controlled language (thesauri) overcomes
keyword limitations
Good sorting functions
Search by treatment of topic: e.g., lit
review, theoretical, experimental
Advanced citation search features – identify
significant papers; track development of
research through time
Refining
search
using
controlled
vocabulary
ScholarsPortal Search:
where has it gone?
the developers (CSA Illumina) have discontinued it
we are no longer able to provide it
all other Scholars Portal services are continuing
other changes in
UofT library searching
Summon
library.utoronto.ca website changes
Using citation databases
Identify key documents using citation data
Ancestors
Aka footnote tracing
Use reference lists from review articles,
significant articles
Descendents
Take most relevant articles or ‘seeds’
Follow them forward in time
Best databases with citation info
Scopus
Web of Science
Google Scholar
Journal Impact Factor
Widely used as measure of significance of
journals in a particular field
Database: ISI Journal Citation Reports
Produced by publishers of Web of Science &
Web of Knowledge, therefore limited to same
pool of titles
ISI journal citation reports
Impact factor
average number of times articles from the journal
published in the past two years have been cited in
the past year
e.g., Impact Factor of 2.5: on average, articles
published one or two years ago have been cited
two and a half times
citing articles may be from the same journal; most
citing articles are from different journals.
Criticisms
journals may
adopt questionable editorial policies that increase
its impact factor, e.g., requiring a number of journal
self-cites
publish a larger percentage of review articles which
generally are cited more than primary articles
change the fraction of "citable items" compared to
front-matter …which types of articles are
considered "citable" is negotiable
Other possible problems
a small number of publications are cited much more
than the majority
e.g., approx 90% of Nature's 2004 impact factor
based on 1/4 of its articles
Eigenfactor Score
the number of times articles from the journal
published in the past five years have been cited in
the JCR year
also considers which journals have contributed these
citations so that highly cited journals will influence
the network more than lesser cited journals
References from one article in a journal to another
article from the same journal are removed, so that
Eigenfactor Scores are not influenced by journal selfcitation
Alerting Services
Email alerts are sent after every
database update
Sent if the update contains any new
records that match your saved query
May be daily, weekly or monthly
RefWorks
refworks.scholarsportal.info
Free for U of T students, staff, faculty
No software installation necessary: browser-based
Organize & cite almost anything:
Journal articles
Book chapters
Library sources
Internet sources
…
Organizing (& presenting) research results
Citation management software
Select
Annotate
Organize
Output approved-style reference lists
Format bibliographies, in-text citations in documents
refworks.scholarsportal.info
Thank you!
Questions, comments?
Please feel free to contact me with
questions or recommendations
[email protected]