Scirus is a search engine which currently indexes 545 million science-related web pages including .edu, .org and .gov sites. A useful option offered by Scirus is that search results can be exported to a citation management program. Results can be filtered by source such as PubMed or ScienceDirect. They also can be limited to patent results via Lexis Nexis or to theses and dissertations from various university repositories. File types is another filter available so you can limit to PowerPoint documents, PDF or HTML. Continue reading
Blog Buzz: March 29 – April 12
As this year’s AACR meeting came to a close, Pieter Droppert, of the Biotech Strategy Blog, wrote about the relative lack of involvement by cancer scientists on twitter during the meeting compared to other conferences. He encouraged researchers to join clinicians and patient advocates who have embraced social media, and pointed out to readers that one of the great opportunities offered by social media in this tough funding climate is the opportunity to communicate the value of your work. You can see this post and link to many other insights from the meeting here.
Mendeley has been purchased by Elsevier and there has been a lot of commentary on social media about what that may mean for the openness Mendeley has been known for. It will be very interesting to see what happens at Mendeley and to the applications running with information from Mendeley’s API, but for the time being here are just a smattering of links to items on this story…
- The Scholarly Kitchen says how you look at the deal is A Matter of Perspective… .
- Former Mendeley research and development head, Jason Hoyt, blogged about the deal, how Elsevier influenced Mendeley’s work while he was there, and why he left.
- William Gunn, Mendeley’s Head of Academic Outreach, offered this sensible response on Quora to the question Mendeley: Is Mendeley’s open character at risk after its acquisition by Elsevier?
Open Access Theses Dissertations
Open Access Theses Dissertations (OATD) is an index of freely available graduate theses and dissertations published around the world. Records come from many colleges, universities, and research institutions. Here is the list of sites that contribute to this index.
OATD does not index or store the full text of the paper. It indexes about the first 30 pages of some theses in order to show search hits. The full text of all papers lives on the original hosting site. More information about this index can be found in their FAQ page.
You can access this resource from here or through the MSKSearch search box from the Library’s Website.