With huge thanks to Mike Spears, the library web site has been redesigned and updated.

What’s New?

• The ability to search PubMed right from the home page.
• In the PubMed search: if you put in a PMID, you’ll be taken directly to the journal article.
• Hours available on the home page
• Research guides (including the equine guides) are available from the home page.
• Under the hood, we’ve improved the handling of “not found” searches to provide help and suggestions that will lead to search results.

Enjoy!

MU Libraries has started a subscription to Science Translational Medicine in response to user requests.  Issues from 2009-date are now available online.

The PubMed Advanced search page has been modified to provide users with a less cluttered, more intuitive way to build searches.

See the NLM Technical Bulletin for full details.

From the NLM Technical Bulletin:

The PubMed Advanced search page has been modified to provide users with a less cluttered, more intuitive way to build searches (see Figure 1).

Terms entered in the builder will automatically populate the search box. Users may change the search field from the All Fields pull-down menu, and then enter terms in the search box. Terms entered in the builder will be added with the default Boolean operator AND, unless OR or NOT are chosen from the pull-down menu. Search field menu selections will be rearranged to display by category, e.g., date search fields will be listed together. The MeSH Terms field will also be enhanced to include an autocomplete feature (see Figure 2).

Users will be able to remove individual terms from the search box using the builder icons next to each selection, or completely clear the search box by clicking Clear.

Clicking Show index list will display an alphabetical list of all terms for a specific search field. Clicking a term in the index list display will automatically add it to the search box (see Figure 3).

Clicking Search will run the search in PubMed. Clicking Add to history will add the search to history, to then be used in a subsequent search, if desired (see Figure 4). The Add to history link replaces the Preview button.

In History, clicking Add next to a history search number will add a previous search to the builder and search box (see Figure 5).

Clicking Edit will permit changes to the final search; however, the builder will be removed from the page since it will no longer control the search. Clicking Cancel will allow you to change your mind and add the builder back to the page (see Figure 6).

For easy accessibility to companion resources, the More Resources section will be moved to the top of the page. This move will subsequently provide room to automatically display up to 100 searches in History (see Figure 7).

By Kathi Canese
National Center for Biotechnology Information

Three important announcements from CABI: 1)  CAB thesaurus updated – the biggest update in 30 years; 2) finding full text via CAB; and 3) new open access Invasive Species Compendium

CAB Thesaurus Updated

Life sciences publisher CABI, UK, has announced that the CAB Thesaurus has had its biggest update in 30 years. The Thesaurus, projected as a comprehensive controlled vocabulary covering applied life sciences and related subject areas, has reportedly grown 40 percent in just one year. It now includes nearly 137,000 terms. The resource contains the scientific names and synonyms for pest- and disease-causing organisms, birds, mammals, insects and other species and details the relationships between them. It seeks to play a vital role in ensuring the quality and consistency of all content produced by CABI. It is also licensed by CABI to a wide variety of other organisations to categorise and index their own content.

Additions to the new edition include 10,000 nematode species mentioned in CABI online databases; world lists of birds, mammals, sucking lice (Anoplura) and trichodectid chewing lice (Mallophaga), with synonyms; complete revisions to the existing taxonomic hierarchies in the thesaurus of dinoflagellates and algae; and 7,275 new insect species from the Medani database, which contains species of veterinary and medical importance.

It is projected that the CAB Thesaurus will double in size in the next five years, and several innovations will be introduced to make it much more than just a controlled vocabulary. The most important of these will be to include semantic features into the thesaurus to make it fit for new CABI products and for wider use as part of the semantic web.

From abstract to full text

Tuesday, December 06, 2011, 11:24:09 AM | Alexis Rendell-Dunn

Most people searching an abstracts database want to be able to click straight through to the full text of a relevant or interesting abstract.

Full text availability is one of the real added value features of CAB Abstracts and the Global Health database, but where and how to find the full text can still be confusing.

Here at CABI we do try hard to make the full text of any paper we abstract for the database(s) available to users by providing links (including DOIs where possible) and holding full text in our own permanent repository. Over the years we have been building a repository of full text material, mainly journals and conferences, which we host on our servers so that users can click through directly from the abstract straight to the full text pdf. The CABI repository currently contains over 85,000 full text papers from scientific journals and over 54,000 full text papers from conferences, plus the full text of a number of reports and single documents. If you search CAB Abstracts or Global Health on our own platform (CAB Direct), all papers held in the CABI Full Text repository have a clearly visible “View Full Text” button. The CABI Full Text repository is also available to searchers using other platforms (e.g. OvidSP).

We created the CABI repository so that we could offer permanent, unbroken links to full text papers from journals and conferences which for some reason or other are not available online or are difficult to find –  some papers, for instance, are available in print only, and some are available online but the links change or websites disappear over time. The initial concept was to provide a win-win situation for authors and users – authors knew that their papers would be more widely disseminated and read if they were accessible through our widely used database, and users would be able to click straight through to the full text. Our aim was to improve access to papers which were ‘difficult-to-find’ i.e. those which were not easily accessible through open access systems or from mainstream sources with a strong web presence.

Once you’ve done your search, here are some suggestions for subscribers on how to access the full text paper or document from an abstract or bibliographic record on the CAB Direct platform (this is generally applicable to CAB Abstracts/Global Health on any platform):

(1) If the abstract has a “View Full Text” button, this is a link to the paper in the CABI Full Text repository (for advanced users, sc:ft in the search box will pick up all records with a full text document in the CABI repository).

(2) If a url is provided on the database record, click on this to go to the publisher or society website. If your institution has a subscription to the journal, you should have access to the full text. If not, you’ll still find that some of these documents may be open access. Some publishers make all their papers open access, others make special issues open access, sometimes within the same issue of a journal some of the papers will be open access and some not. Others apply an embargo, so that papers published before a certain date become open access. All these models change frequently and the only certain way of knowing whether the full text is available (either open access or paid for) is to try the website.

(3) If the abstract record has a DOI this is even better. The DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is a unique identifier for that paper. Clicking on the DOI will take you straight to the exact document. Try copying the DOI into your Google search box to see if the paper has been deposited in an institutional or other repository.

(4) Or you can contact the author directly – most recent records have email contacts.

Finally, if you are a conference organizer, editor or society and wish to see your papers held in our repository so they are easily accessible to a worldwide audience of subscribers, please contact our Full Text Coordinator.

Open Access Invasive Species Compendium

The Invasive Species Compendium (ISC) is an Open Access encyclopaedic resource that brings together a wide range of different types of science-based information to support decision-making in invasive species management worldwide. It comprises detailed datasheets that have been written by experts, edited by an independent scientific organization, peer reviewed, and enhanced with data from specialist organizations, images, and maps, a bibliographic database and full text articles. New datasheets and data sets continue to be added, datasheets are reviewed and updated, and scientific literature added on a weekly basis. The ISC has been resourced by a diverse international Consortium of Government departments, Non-governmental organizations and private companies.

Getting spammed by requests from journals and publishers you’ve never heard of? Check out Jeffrey Beale’s 2012 list of Predatory Open Access Publishers

What’s a predatory OA publisher?

“Predatory, open-access publishers are those that unprofessionally exploit the author-pays model of open-access publishing (Gold OA) for their own profit. Typically, these publishers spam professional email lists, broadly soliciting article submissions for the clear purpose of gaining additional income.” (Beale)

More on Open Access from SPARC

Check out the pictures from our 25th Anniversary Symposium! In this MOspace collection, you’ll also find videos, posters, and the program.

J. Otto Lottes Health Sciences Library Anniversary Symposium

Enjoy!

Google Scholar Citations is now open to all.  Create a My Citations profile to see citations to your articles, graph citations over time, and compute various metrics (such as the h-index).

You can make your profile public and invite others to do so.

For fun, check out Albert Einstein’s citation profile.

The 6th Annual BioMed Central Research Awards celebrates high quality research made freely available through open access publishing. There are 15 award categories this year including 10 new categories, the winners of which will be shortlisted for the BioMed Central Research Award. We invite you to nominate the finest research from the last 12 months before 31st December 2011.

More information on the BMC Research Awards.

Speaking of Open Access…

Did you know that many publishers allow you to self-archive your articles? Before submitting to a journal, check the copyright agreement to make sure you can post your work to MOspace, MU’s digital institutional repository.

Check out this new online resource!

Writing for Publication in Veterinary Medicine: A Practical Guide for Researchers and Clinicians

Happy Writing!