Dr. Vijay Bhargava is moving from his position as Editor in Chief of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications to become IEEE Communications Society’s Director of Journals.

Read the full article here.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Electrical and Computer Engineering

EZproxy Unavailable – Thursday, Feb 4th, 2:00PM – 6:00PM

Because of the EZProxy work, Books 24×7 will have connection issues till possibly Friday morning. The “old” login (for anyone familiar with the blue screen) will work if you have a pre-existing account. The new will not. See the Library Information Page for your login options. Only “Alternate online access: Click here for the electronic version.” links will work in the catalog during this time.

Many thanks!

This is a very interesting list showing the the top 20 institutions which attracted the highest total citations to their papers published in Thomson Reuters-indexed Engineering journals. These institutions are the top 20 out of a pool of 1,084 institutions comprising the top 1% ranked by total citation count in this field.

Must read – http://sciencewatch.com/inter/ins/10/10febTOP20ENG/

No Canadian institutions in the top twenty list…

The Street Level Forecast (SLF) is an interactive point forecast planning tool that brings customized forecasts to the user. SLF makes weather data accessible and user- friendly. Click on a specific location on an interactive map to receive personal forecasts such as wind and temperature that are provided on an easy-to-read graph.

The computer model that drives the SLF is run twice daily at a one kilometer resolution (a grid of points one kilometer apart across the region) and predicts conditions for the next 19 hours.

This SLF is an experimental prototype that Environment Canada will test during the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games period. This version will be live until March 31, 2010.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Library for Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of British Columbia

The Huffington Post had a post yesterday about some beautiful world libraries. Personally, I liked the Yale’s Rare books library…

For books on libraries architecture, please see this link – http://resolve.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/catsearch?subject=Library+architecture

** photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/selva/

With the Winter 2010 Olympics less than 30 days away, the analytic chemists and their rivals are hard at work.

The journal Drug Testing and Analysis has a wide variety of articles looking at performance enhancing drugs and therapies.

Have a look at the article The hunt for gene dopers authored by Mansour, Mai M. H. and Azzazy, Hassan M. E.

Here’s the abstract of the article.
Gene doping, the abuse of gene therapy for illicit athletic enhancement, is perceived as a coming threat and is a prime concern to the anti-doping community. This doping technique represents a significant ethical challenge and there are concerns regarding its safety for athletes. This article presents the basics of gene doping, potential strategies for its detection and the role of promising new technologies in aiding detection efforts. These include the use of lab-on-a-chip techniques as well as nanoparticles to enhance the performance of current analytical methods and to develop new doping detection strategies. Copyright 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Medline and Web of Science and two excellent databases to monitor this spy vs spy battle between the IOC, the World Anti-Doping Agency and the performance enhancers.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Chemistry at the University of British Columbia

The BBC has reported last week about scientists in Italy making artificial replacement bones out of wood – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8438209.stm

A quick search in the Compendex database shows dozens and dozens of research reports of using wood as a possible implant material.

** photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/challiyan/

Every year the Chemical Abstracts Service of the American Chemical Society publishes a wonderful calendar – the Colors of Chemistry. Starting in 2010 this calendar is now available either as a free download or as an online interactive calendar.

Go to 2010 Colors of Chemistry Calendar and choose your option.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the University of British Columbia.

Here is my newest article – “A Library Journal Club as a Tool for Current Awareness and Open Communication: UBC case study” which oddly sees light online during the last week of 2009.

It is published in a free, open access, Canadian journal  – Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research.

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/svenwerk/

There are currently two very useful journal rankings SCImago and JCR. These rankings allow you to display amongst other things the h-index for a specific journal or a grouping of journals based on subject

“The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.).” Scopus contains more than 15,000 journals from over 4,000 international publishers as well as over 1000 open access journals. There are also over 500 conference proceedings in the database.

For more information, go to SCImago

“Journal Citation Reports® is a comprehensive and unique resource that allows you to evaluate and compare journals using citation data drawn from over 7,500 scholarly and technical journals from more than 3,300 publishers in over 60 countries.”
JCR Science Edition contains data from over 5,900 journals in science and technology.
JCR Social Sciences Edition contains data from over 1,700 journals in the social sciences.

For more information, go to JCR (Journal Citation Reports)

It is important to be aware of the size of the body of literature (the number of journals and conference proceedings) being indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. Journals listed in JCR are indexed in the Web of Science The larger the database, the greater the possibility that articles will be discovered, read, and hopefully cited. This is especially important for open access journals, some of which have not yet been indexed in the Web of Science.

Eigenfactor ranking is based on Web of Science data.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Science and Engineering