STEM Access

JoVE Science Education Database

Just a quick follow up on the last post about JoVE.  I mentioned that JoVE has protocol papers and a Science Education Database.  The Science Education Database gives short videos on how to perform common laboratory techniques and is great for those needing to review for class or even for students to view in a flipped classroom setting. They keep on changing the way they’re organizing the modules, but the ones we have are Basic Biology SE1 General Laboratory Techniques SE2 Basic Methods in Cellular and Molecular Biology Advanced Biology SE5 Essentials of Neuroscience Please let us know if...
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STEM Access

Protocol Papers and the Journal of Visualized Experiments

In the past I’ve talked about the structure of the classic scientific articles, but there are other types of scholarly, peer-reviewed scientific articles.  One of those is the protocol papers.  Because one of the hallmarks of the scientific method is repeatability, knowing how experiments are performed, or the protocol, is important so that other researcher can confirm results or perform similar experiments.  Protocol papers focus on the method of the experiment, and there journals that are dedicated to publishing only protocol papers. One of these journals is the Journal of  Visualized Experiments (JoVE).  But JoVE is not your typical...
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Guest posts

What is Digital Scholarship?

Guest post by Digital Scholarship Librarian Megan Martinsen As Baylor’s Digital Scholarship Librarians, the question we get the most is: what is digital scholarship? It’s a great question, but one that’s surprisingly tricky to answer. At different institutions, digital scholarship may be called different things or encompass different activities. But here at Baylor we define Digital Scholarship as the use of digital tools to ask/answer research questions in new ways and to create a narrative with data. Ok, sure, great, but what does that even mean? It turns out, the easiest way to explain digital scholarship is to show...
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Uncategorized

Score with sports info using SBRnet

So, how many people watched an NFL game during the year?  How does this compare to baseball?  What is the gender breakdown for NFL or MLB fans?  Median age for these folks?   Sounds like interesting or challenging questions to answer?  The library has a resource that can help you should sports related questions come your way.  SBRnet is the leading source for sports market analytics. Whether you are looking for information on major league sports or the lesser known sports such as Lacrosse, inline skating, billiards or skateboarding, SBRnet contains statistics, news items and special features on professional, college...
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Awaiting Discovery

Readers, Printers, and their Records

Have you ever wondered what people are reading or what was available to them to read?  Amazon’s stats and the New York Times Best Sellers list makes it fairly easy to track what is popular, but these figures are largely based on sales or production runs. I’d like to suggest two sources of information for finding out what actual readers thought about books, how books and ideas influenced lives, and what was available to readers to read from the early modern period through the early 20th century. RED: The Reading Experience (http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/) documents what individuals in Great Britain and Canada actually read from...
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The top 100 papers

The journal Nature posted a neat feature the other day exploring the top 100 cited papers (in the sciences), using the database Web of Science (which Baylor folks can access here).  They had some surprising conclusions: The exercise revealed some surprises, not least that it takes a staggering 12,119 citations to rank in the top 100 — and that many of the world’s most famous papers do not make the cut. A few that do, such as the first observation of carbon nanotubes (number 36) are indeed classic discoveries. But the vast majority describe experimental methods or software that have become essential in...
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Library 411

5 Tips for Library Success

Spring semester 2016. Whether it’s your second semester at Baylor and you finally feel like you’re no longer a newbie, or your last semester at Baylor before heading out in to the real world, beyond the Baylor bubble, we’ve got some library tips for you to help make your research, study and life easier for you this semester. 1. Plan Your Research Papers Whether you’re a procrastinator or a planner, writing a research paper is a daunting task.  There’s just so much that has to be done – selecting a topic, narrowing down a thesis, doing library research to find...
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PolicyMap

The Baylor Libraries has added another database to our resources.  We now have access to PolicyMap.  So, you are probably wondering “what is PolicyMap and how is it going to help me?”.  PolicyMap provides demographic, education, health, and geographic data.  It offers the user the capability of presenting the data visually through maps, tables, and reports.  What this means is that though PolicyMap, you can access data on Income & Spending, Health, Economy, Lending, Education, Housing and Quality of Life and present it visually on maps or in tables.  The maps feature allows you to select a location such...
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J.P. Morgan Research is here

Looking for high quality information on a company?  Look no further than J.P. Morgan Research from ProQuest.  J.P. Morgan Research is a major source of highly regarded financial information.  It contains in-depth reports for 3,400 companies analyzed by 800 expert research analysts worldwide, covering all industries and all regions with just a 7 day embargo.   This is information that was previously unavailable to us and was frequently requested by business students.  Since the database contains historical information, researchers can look at a total picture of a company’s or industry’s performance. If you have used ABI/Inform before, then J.P....
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Help! I need information on a country

So, you have found yourself in a situation where you need information on a country  — something other than the United States.  It could be that you need the GDP or the % of the population receiving an education or any other of a number of facts you might need.  Where do you look for this?  Here are a few places that you might want to check into.  Some are databases that we subscribe to through the library and others are websites that are free to all. CountryWatch – CountryWatch is a great database that provides country-specific intelligence on...
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