Before and after CrossRefby Dr. Walt Warnick 19 Dec, 2013 in Personal Perspectives
It is truly wonderful when something comes along that speeds access to science. Such is the case with CrossRef’s linking network for scholarly literature. Anyone that has ever done a literature search prior to 2000 is completely blown away today when they encounter the time saved and the quality of CrossRef’s linking service. I vividly recall my own literature review for my PhD dissertation almost 40 years ago and I want to share my story. For many long and miserable days and nights for a solid month I practically lived at the University of Maryland’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Library plowing through a massive set of numerous volumes of citation indices looking up keywords related to my dissertation. My topic Secondary deflections and lateral stability of beams was based on my research at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. None of my faculty had specialized in such topics and so my task was monumental-- do a full blown literature review from scratch. I would write down suspected relevant citations and walk through the extensive stacks of the library where I could locate the journal, find the right volume of the journal, and examine the article. Since the indexing contained minimal information, most of the time the articles weren’t relevant and much of my effort was fruitless. When I got lucky and found a relevant article, I had to copy the citation information and meat of the article by hand. Then I had to scour the references in that article and determine if it was necessary to find the referenced journals in the stacks and examine the referenced articles. This is how a dissertation literature review was done before online... Related Topics: CrossRef, dissertation, DOE Data Explorer (DDE), dois, ETDEWEB, FundRef, journal articles, literature review, SciTech Connect Read more... |
ETDEWEB World Energy Baseby Debbie Cutler 27 Jun, 2012 in Products and Content
Just in time for the summer heat, a refreshing new design of ETDEWEB World Energy Base! New results screen and display options make your search experience cool. (Registration may be required). See more records on your search results screen and don’t forget to use the new ‘…Show More’ to expand content. Interested in full text? Users may now limit their searches to show only records with full text available. Not sure exactly what you want to search for? Check out the latest ETDEWEB World Energy Base enhancement: Popular Topics. Using Popular Topics will give you search results from topics you may have not thought to explore yet. Or if a Popular Topic is already your area of interest, simply click the search to get the latest information available. ETDEWEB World Energy Base is constantly working to expand the content you know and love. Come explore and search for information on energy R&D; energy policy and planning; basic sciences and materials research; the environmental impact of energy production and use, including climate change; energy conservation; nuclear; coal and fossil fuels; renewable energy technologies and much, much more. ETDE is always open to receiving your thoughts and suggestions. Related Topics: climate change, coal, conservation, energy, ETDEWEB, fossil, fuels, nuclear, r&d Read more... |
Beyond Collecting: Connectingby Dr. Walt Warnick 19 Nov, 2008 in Technology by Walt Warnick and Sol Lederman OSTI has embraced a new paradigm for sharing scientific and technical information (STI). Historically, OSTI has fulfilled its mission of providing STI to scientists, researchers, and the public by hosting, or collecting, documents and/or metadata. OSTI's new paradigm is to make content searchable that is often hosted by others; today, OSTI connects those seeking the content with the organizations that host it. Beginning in the late 1940's, with OSTI's production of the Nuclear Science Abstracts - which was to go on for nearly 30 years, OSTI entered into the business of collecting information. Beginning in the 1990's, OSTI began creating web application to make the collected content openly accessible and conveniently searchable. ETDE Web, DOE Information Bridge, the Energy Citations Database, and DOE R&D Accomplishments are some of the successful applications. In the last several years, OSTI's approach to disseminating STI has evolved. Recent applications such as the Eprint Network, Science.gov, DOE Science Accelerator, and WorldWideScience.org connect users with the highest quality science information without collecting or hosting it. How does OSTI move beyond collecting to connecting and what does connecting mean? OSTI's new applications search content that is housed in document repositories owned by a number of government agencies and government-sanctioned organizations. OSTI applications search a number of these repositories on the fly and they aggregate the content from the sources they search and present the most relevant of the search results to the user. This simultaneous and real-time search of multiple repositories is called federated search. OSTI's federated search applications serve as... Related Topics: DOE Research & Development (R&D) Accomplishments, Energy Citations Database (ECD), ETDEWEB, mission, sti Read more... |
Accelerating Science Discovery - Join the Discussion
