Noted information scholar Peter Jasco, PhD, has published a critique of Google Scholar’s handling of article metadata. While basic topical searching produces good results, author-based searching or citation searching is problematic: Google’s algorithms create phantom authors for millions of papers. They derive false names from options listed on the search menu, such as P Login (for [...]

The Presidents of 57 liberal arts colleges in the U.S., representing 22 states, have declared their support for the Federal Research Public Access Act (S. 1373) in an Open Letter released on September 23rd.  The letter is the first from higher education administrators to be issued in support of the 2009 bill, and further reinforcement [...]

Science Signaling, a weekly resource on cell signaling associated with the journal Science, has enhanced its product with some new features: Editorial Guides feature opinions from scientists and Editorial Board members, and e-letters from the scientific community. View a sample. Stand-alone Focus Issues appear in Science Signaling or may be the dedicated subject focus in [...]

The American Chemical Society (ACS) has announced that recordings of more than 150 presentations from its 238th National Meeting (August 2009) are now available online without charge.   The sessions are available online at http://www.softconference.com/ACSchem/am.asp. The Society began releasing presentation recordings in a small way with its spring 2009 meeting, and hopes to continue to build [...]

The NIH requires articles that have been supported by NIH funding to be deposited to PubMed Central (PMC), and requires researchers to provide each article’s ID number assigned by PMC on all grant reports and subsequent grant applications. But many articles are embargoed for months after they are deposited (because of publisher requirements), and not [...]

Do you study proteins and/or use 3D structure data? The NCBI Structure Group web site has added new “How To” files, with examples, for the 3D Macromolecular Structure resources and for the Conserved Domains resources. You’ll find the Molecular Modeling Database (MMDB) when you follow the PubMed for Jeffersonians link on the JEFFLINE homepage, and [...]

In its latest software update, RefWorks added dozens of new output styles and updated several existing styles. The new options will be available automatically the next time you log into your RefWorks account — no work required from  you! New styles of interest to Jeffersonians: American Heart Association: Hypertension Biochimica et Biophysica Acta: General Subjects [...]

Amazing as it may seem, academic journal reviewers and editors are the target of a current phishing scam. Phishing is a con that attempts to fool you into providing personal information to people who then abuse it. This one pretends to be an official communication to faculty, from the publishing giant, Elsevier.  It may look [...]

From the NIH announcement: Comprehensive funding information for NIH grants and contracts is now available on the NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tool (RePORT) thanks to a new, user-friendly system called the RePORT Expenditures and Results, or RePORTER. RePORTER combines NIH project databases and funding records, PubMed abstracts, full-text articles from PubMed Central, and information [...]

Did you know? The NCBI BioSystems Database contains biological pathways from two source databases, KEGG and the EcoCyc subset of BioCyc.  It is designed to accommodate other types of biosystems, such as diseases, as data about them become available. The NCBI BioSystems Database was developed as a collaborative and complementary project to (1) serve as a [...]