Google Scholar/Compendex Smackdown

John J. Meier and Thomas W. Conkling have a great new article out in the May 2008 issue of the Journal of Academic Librarianship (v.34: no.3, pp.196-201).  In “Google Scholar’s Coverage of the Engineering Literature: An Empirical Study”, they compare retrievals in both GS and Compendex for eight searches in various areas of engineering.  GS compares favorably well to Compendex, particularly in recent decades.  GS is also very good in searching areas such as aeronautical and nuclear engineering in previous decades.

Two important points from this article: GS is much better at indexing the technical report literature than Compendex.  Meier and Conkling emphasize that many of the records in GS (as I’m sure most of you are aware) are fragmentary or “information thin” as they put it.  This can be a serious shortcoming in terms of finding an abstract or tracking down the original article – unless you happen to be a librarian, of course.

The proxied link to access this article via Waldo Library is as follows (you will be prompted for your BroncoNet ID if you are off-campus):

http://libproxy.library.wmich.edu/login?url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2008.03.002

Post idea courtesy of John Dupuis’ “Confessions of a Science Librarian“ – hope I get a chance to meet him at next week’s ASEE Conference in Pittsburgh.

Wood Handbook online PDF

Helping a student out in paper chemistry and imaging yesterday, I discovered a great reference work on the engineering uses and properties of wood. (Unfortunately I discovered it after she left the library…) This book is called the Wood Handbook: Wood as an Engineering Material. (General Technical Report 113. Madison, WI: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory. 463p, 1999.) It is viewable and downloadable as an online PDF file (both as a whole and in each individual chapter) from the above link. There are two links that will get you here – one is a PURL (persistent uniform resource locator). I’ve pasted them below for your ED-ification.

URL1: http://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/fplgtr/fplgtr113/fplgtr113.htm

URL2 (PURL): http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS2988

Chapter headings of this book include:

Chapter 1 — Characteristics and Availability of Commercially Important Wood
Chapter 2 — Structure of Wood
Chapter 3 — Physical Properties and Moisture Relations of Wood
Chapter 4 — Mechanical Properties of Wood
Chapter 5 — Commercial Lumber
Chapter 6 — Lumber Stress Grades and Design Properties
Chapter 7 — Fastenings
Chapter 8 — Structural Analysis Equations
Chapter 9 — Adhesive Bonding of Wood Materials
Chapter 10 — Wood-Based Composites and Panel Products
Chapter 11 — Glued Structural Members
Chapter 12 — Drying and Control of Moisture Content and Dimensional Changes
Chapter 13 — Biodeterioration of Wood
Chapter 14 — Wood Preservation
Chapter 15 — Finishing of Wood
Chapter 16 — Use of Wood In Building and Bridges
Chapter 17 — Fire Safety
Chapter 18 — Round Timbers and Ties
Chapter 19 — Specialty Treatments
Glossary
Index

Ethics of Presenting Information

“How much does a problematic presentational style signal poor engineering? Is it just PP or a PP designer weakening the quality of evidence? Or are there deeper intellectual failures?…” – Edward Tufte

Great questions all! I discovered a great website this morning by Edward Tufte, a well-known author of books on statistics and the visual presentation of information. His personal website has a page devoted to a devastating critique of the use of Powerpoint by NASA in the investigation of the Columbia space shuttle explosion of 2003. This is very relevant to engineers, who are continually asked to present information visually. This page would be a great discussion starter in technical communications classes (hint, hint).

Much of this material comes from his book Beautiful Evidence (Graphics Press, 2006), which sad to say, we do not yet own at Waldo Library. (But don’t worry – I plan on ordering and reading it this month.)

As Tufte was quoted as saying in a July 13, 2006 review of his book in Nature, “Making an evidence presentation is a moral act as well as an intellectual activity. To maintain standards of quality, relevance and integrity of evidence, consumers of presentations should insist that presenters be held intellectually and ethically responsible for what they show and tell. Thus consuming is also an intellectual and moral activity.”

Treesearch – a USDA forestry database

Reading an article in the latest Science & Technology Libraries by Bradley Brazzeal and Robert Fowler on “Patterns of Information Use in Graduate Research in Forestry: A Citation Analysis of Master’s Theses at Mississippi State University”, I discovered a reference to a great government forestry database called Treesearch.  It is an online database to publications (articles, books and book chapters, and conference papers) by USDA forestry researchers.  All of this stuff is freely available in full text format (Adobe Acrobat PDF) from this site because it is all in the public domain.  You can search by keyword, author, and title, as well as limiting by date.  The URL for the site is http://www.treesearch.fs.fed.us/

This is relevant to Paper Engineering due to the number of references dealing with wood and the structure of wood.

Materials Science – Sage Full Text Journals

Waldo Library subscribes to the following materials science journals in full text for the years indicated via the Sage Full Text Materials Science Journals platform:

• High Performance Polymers (1991-current)
• International Journal of Damage Mechanics (1992-current)
• Journal of Bioactive and Compatible Polymers (1986-current)
• Journal of Biomaterials Applications (1989-current)
• Journal of Cellular Plastics (1965-current)
• Journal of Composite Materials (1967-current)
• Journal of Elastomers and Plastics (1969-current)
• Journal of Industrial Textiles (1971-current)
• Journal of Intelligent Material Systems and Structures (1990-current
• Journal of Plastic Film and Sheeting (1985-current)
• Journal of Reinforced Plastics and Composites (1982-current)
• Journal of Sandwich Structures & Materials (1999-current)
• Journal of Thermoplastic Composite Materials (1988-current)
• Mathematics and Mechanics of Solids (1996-current)
• Structural Health Monitoring (2002-current)

You can access these journals via the link above or from the Waldo Library homepage.  If accessing from off-campus, you will need to enter your BroncoNet ID and password.

PaperChem, a Paper Science Database

 

Those of you in the Paper Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Imaging department are no doubt aware that Waldo Library provides you access to a paper engineering database called PaperChem (published by the people who bring you Engineering Village). According to the blurb on the site, PaperChem covers the “international literature related to pulp and paper technology. It includes abstracts of journal articles, conference papers and technical reports with more than 500,000 records.” Looking at the usage statistics for this database over the last two years, I’ve noticed that it is only averaging about 150 searches per month. This seems rather low, given how many paper chemistry faculty and students we have in CEAS. Please tell your students about this database, particularly your graduate students who will need to do an extensive literature review for their theses and dissertations. This database should be your and their best friend!! As always, I am more than willing to show them or you how to use this fine resource.

 

ACM Digital Library

Waldo Library subscribes to the ACM Digital Library, an online database that provides you with the full text of every article ever published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Waldo’s subscription includes journal articles, magazines, newsletters, transactions AND conference proceedings. 2739 documents were viewed or downloaded in 2006 and 1540 in 2007 by WMU patrons. This is an invaluable resource for computer science and electrical engineering research. Using your BroncoNet ID and password, you can access it via the link above or from the Waldo Library homepage.

New Sci-Tech Search Engine to Rival Google Scholar

From: Jay Bhatt at EngLibrary Blog and Really Simple Sidi Blog

A group of thirteen science and technology professional organizations is partnering with the Deep Web Technologies search engine firm to create a scholarly web search engine to index and search their content.  This new search engine will be called Scitopia.org and will be rolled out in June 2007.  Participating associations include:

American Geophysical Union (AGU)
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)
American Institute of Physics (AIP)
American Physical Society (APS)
American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)
American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
The Electrochemical Society (ECS)
IEEE
Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP)
Optical Society of America (OSA)
SPIE
Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE)
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)

Scitopia will be designed to take a search and farm it out to each of the individual society digital library pages and return with the results.

You can read an Information Today article by Barbara Quint about this initiative.

Further additional science/technology-related web search engines that you should check out include:

Science.gov – the portal to sci-tech U.S. Government documents and websites

Scirus.com – web search engine created by Elsevier Ltd.

Citations in Engineering Master’s Theses

I am currently working on a study of master’s theses published at my university from 2002-2006. I am doing a citation analysis of the references of these theses, tabulating how many of each type of source (scholarly journal, conference proceeding, technical report, etc.) are found in each reference list. I hope to compare the patterns I find to PhD theses published here, and perhaps eventually to the patterns found in faculty publications at my school.

Some initial thoughts on what I’m seeing so far: Civil engineering master’s students seem to use an awful lot of websites as sources. Many of these websites are grey literature type field reports and white papers. However, many are also company reports or individual webpages with little authority. One thesis cited several newspaper articles. I am also finding that a number of these sites are no longer available, even after only three years. Which begs the question as to how valid it is to cite sources that are so fluid, that vanish so quickly, such that other engineering researchers will not be able to follow-up on or use the same sources you did. Is this a valid way to conduct research? My personal feeling is no. But then again, I am not the person responsible for teaching these graduate students how to conduct literature reviews. (Or am I?) This is something I think I want to address at some point in the next few years. How are these students learning how to do literature searches? I swear many of the sources I’m finding seem to have been discovered using Google, which I know is common in undergraduate work. I’m just surprised to see it at the graduate level also.

In addition, one thesis I looked at actually did not cite even one scholarly journal! The sources were all websites, newspapers, grey literature and company sites.

My initial impression after looking at about thirty theses so far is that this pattern is much more common in the civil engineering theses than in the ones I’ve looked at in materials engineering, mechanical engineering or computer science. I’ll know more by early summer, when I hopefully will be finished with the initial data collection from the Master’s theses. Quite interesting.

Search the ICE Virtual Library

The Institution of Civil Engineers (UK) have, via JISC Collections and Thomas Telford Publishing, created a virtual library to all ICE publications (journals, proceedings, minutes, transactions, and division papers) from 1836 to 2001.  You can search the ICE Virtual Library for free; however, all full text content is only available to subscribers.  However, Waldo Library will order any of these articles for you for free via Interlibrary Loan.

This is a rich source of civil engineering history in Great Britain for a hundred and fifty years.

I’ve placed a link to this resource in our Civil Engineering Databases page.

Posting from: STLQ Blog Posting, 3/17/07