Re: Cross-discipline journal discovery Patricia Pettijohn 19 Mar 2008 16:43 UTC
It's a good question. If you have access to Current Contents Connect, http://scientific.thomson.com/products/ccc/ it offers multidisciplinary coverage of journal contents, and you can sign up for e-mail alerts on topics, authors, keywords. ScieFinder Scholar also is useful for current awareness. Many academic journals offer table of content alert services by e-mail. For your patron, and for open access patrons generally, the Public Library of Science, PLOS may help; the link below describes their e-alert services. http://www.plos.org/connect.html Popular science and technology magazines online, science sections of major newspapers, (The New York Times, Science, Nature) and subject-specific scholarly and popular science communities, including scholarly societies and larger professional associations, with their related e-newsletters and e-portals, provide much of the electronic version of scanning the browsing section of a good periodicals library. For research news, try Science Watch http://sciencewatch.com/ You can sign up for e-alerts at Google News, but must be specific in defining terms. In advanced Google Scholar, you can date restrict, or, once you have executed a search, you can click on the hyper-linked words RECENT NEWS, at the top. I haven't used SciTopia, but it is supposed to offer open access table of contents alerts: Scitopia.org currently accesses the electronic libraries of these thirteen participating sci-tech societies: * American Geophysical Union (AGU; www.agu.org) * American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA; www.aiaa.org) * American Institute of Physics (AIP; www.aip.org) * American Physical Society (APS; www.aps.org) * American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE; www.asce.org) * American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME; www.asme.org) * The Electrochemical Society (ECS; www.electrochem.org) * IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.; www.ieee.org) * Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP; www.iop.org) * Optical Society of America (OSA; www.osa.org) * SPIE (International Society for Optical Engineering; http://www.spie.org) * SAE International (Society of Automotive Engineers; www.sae.org) * Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM; www.siam.org) Patricia Pettijohn Head, Collection Development & Technical Services Nelson Poynter Memorial Library University of South Florida Saint Petersburg 140 Seventh Avenue South, POY 118 Saint Petersburg, Florida 33701 ppettijohn@nelson.usf.edu 727-873-4407 " I see skies of blue and clouds of white The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night And I think to myself: what a wonderful world. " ~ Louis Armstrong -----Original Message----- From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum [mailto:SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU] On Behalf Of Thompson, Allison Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 9:33 AM To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU Subject: [SERIALST] Cross-discipline journal discovery In the McMaster libraries, we have done away with current issue displays (as of last week); all issues are shelved in the stacks once they arrive. I had a patron come in with a very interesting question: Now that the current journal issues are not displayed, what means of serendipitous discovery of journal content across disciplines is there? Though his specialty is Biochemistry, he used to go to our science library to look at the new issues of ALL journals on display (mathematics, computer science, etc.) He now believes that because the current issues are 'hidden' and you have to know what you are looking for to find them, that his research will suffer from lack of a wider viewpoint. I pointed him to databases, RSS alerts and publisher's webpages, but in these instances you still have to know a little something about what you are looking for before you find it. Does anyone have any other suggestions for cross-discipline journal discovery? Are there websites you know of that meet this need? Or do your libraries have 'homemade' solutions? Your input is appreciated! Sincerely, Allison __________________________________ Allison Thompson eResources Librarian Health Sciences Library McMaster University Hamilton, ON 905-525-9140 ext. 22609 http://hsl.mcmaster.ca