Forms of STI - pt. 2by Tim Byrne 20 Jun, 2008 in Products and Content In the first part to this post, Forms of STI, I talked about how there are different forms of scientific and technical information and how each is published and disseminated in its own way. OSTI has different search tools to access the different types of STI. In the last post I discussed technical reports. Now I will cover journal literature, conference proceedings and papers, and e-prints, defining each and pointing out the OSTI search tools that covers each. Journal literature: The publication of research in scientific journals started in the mid seventeenth century. Before that and for some time after, scientific and technical information was circulated via letters, printed tracts and books. Journals became a preferred medium because journal publishers worked to achieve wider dissemination and faster publication. Today, however, even with the tremendous growth in scientific journals in the later half of the twentieth century, publishing in scientific journals is most often not a speedy process. It can often take a year of more for an article to be published once it has been accepted by a journal. For this reason, many scientists and engineers also utilize other means to share their research. Options include technical reports, conference papers, pre-prints and a growing use of e-prints. From 1948 to 1976, the Atomic Energy Commission published Nuclear Science Abstracts, providing comprehensive indexing of the international nuclear science literature, including journal literature on a worldwide basis. This literature can now be found using Energy Citations Database. ECD... Related Topics: conference papers, conference proceedings, E-Print Network (EPN), e-prints, Energy Citations Database (ECD), Energy Files, Information Bridge (IB), journal articles, osti, Science Conference Proceedings, Science.gov, sti Read more... |
Forms of STIby Tim Byrne 19 Jun, 2008 in Products and Content A comment I have heard on numerous occasions is that OSTI has a too many databases and search tools and it is difficult to know which to use. Well, I am sure that a lot of people do find the variety of OSTI resources to be a bit confusing, but it really takes different types of databases and search tools to cover all the different types of scientific and technical information (STI). Scientific and technical information has many forms, such as journal articles, technical reports, patents and e-prints. Each has its own publication route which requires its own method of acquisition. A traditional library is built by compiling a collection of books and periodicals for use by library patrons. In the electronic world, collections have expanded beyond the walls of the library. OSTI is able to create two different types of electronic collections. The first type is more like a traditional library in that OSTI compiles a collection of STI produced by or funded under the provenance of the Department of Energy on an OSTI computer. OSTI controls what goes into these collections and in what format. The OSTI databases that are of this sort include the full text documents in the Information Bridge and the bibliographic citations and summaries created for the Energy Citations Database, DOEpatents, and the DOE R&D Project Summaries. The second type of electronic collection is a virtual collection of STI outside of DOE. These collections contain STI that is of interest to DOE, but, for the most part, is not produced by DOE. The citations and full text documents in these virtual collections reside on the Internet in servers all over the world. OSTI has identified the locations of the STI and provides a means to search... Related Topics: conference papers, conferences, DOE Research and Development (R&D) Project Summaries, DOepatents, E-Print Network (EPN), e-prints, Energy Citations Database (ECD), Information Bridge (IB), journal articles, patents, proceedings, project summaries, Science Accelerator, Science Conference Proceedings, Science.gov, sti, technical reports, theses, WorldWideScience.org (WWS) Read more... |
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