STEM Access

ORCID

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) maintains a registry of unique identifiers for researchers and allows them to associate their ORCID ids with different name variants as well as education and work history, funding received, and research/creative works.  Unique ORCID ids allow researchers to distinguish themselves from others (name disambiguation) and maximize their research measurement impact. Name disambiguation is great for people who have common (last) names such as Smith or Lee or for people who have changed their name.  With a unique ORCID id you can distinguish yourself from all the other researchers with your last name and...
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STEM Access

Learn about Science and Scientists through Graphic Novels

Did you know that Baylor Libraries has graphic novels in their collection?  Did you know that they are not just about superheros?  Did you know that you can learn about science through graphic novels.  Below are just some of the graphic novels we have in our collection. Some of them are Biographies Logicomix about Bertrand Russell Feynman Darwin : a graphic biography : the really exciting and dramatic story of a man who mostly stayed at home and wrote some books Primates : the fearless science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas Some of them focus on...
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STEM Access

2nd Texas STEM Librarians Conference

Last Thursday to Saturday, I had the pleasure of attending the 2nd annual STEM librarians conference in Denton.  The conference almost doubled in size from last year and UNT did a great job of hosting. Librarians from all around Texas (but mainly the DFW area) presented on all different subjects even though the theme for the conference was e-books.  In addition, there were roundtable groups and panel discussions with various vendors. The pre-conference on Thursday was on gaming and education.  We spent the afternoon playing educational games from this list and heard an interesting talk about from an educational...
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STEM Access

How to Deal with Rejection

So after last week, you’ve picked what journal to submit to, and you wait (and wait and wait) to see whether your paper is accepted.  When the day finally comes, your paper hasn’t been accepted.  And if you’re like me, you get filled with a range of emotion to the point of crying. But as was pointed out to me recently in an email from the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, we should think of rejection rates like batting averages.  A batting average of .4000 is almost unheard of.  And a batting average of .2500 is pretty...
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STEM Access

Where to Submit an Article

Since we seem to be talking about scientific writing this month, the question of where to submit your article arises.  Now the easiest thing to do is to look through the list of references you used and see which journal(s) you cited the most often, and then submit to that journal.  You can also ask your colleagues or adviser who have read the paper for suggestions. But if you’ve narrowed the list down to two or three journals, how do you decide which is best?  There are two things to consider:  relevance and accessibility. By narrowing down your list...
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STEM Access

Scientific Jargon

Following up on last week‘s post on the book Scientific English by Day and Sakaduski which has some useful lists of “Problem Words and Expressions” and “Words and Expressions to Avoid,” this week I present a list of terms that have different meanings to scientists and to the general public.  I was first alerted to this list on a blog by the Eric Berger, science writer at the Houston Chronicle. This list originally came from an article in Physics Today which discussed how climate scientists can improve how the present their findings to a general audience (hence, the inclusion...
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STEM Access

Book Review: Scientific English

On occasion I plan to review books on the blog.  Some will be of professional interest; others will be of general science interest.  I doubt if too many of them will be for fun (unless I find a really good mystery novel set in a science department of a university).  Today I will review Scientific Writing by Robert Day and Nancy Sakaduski. I was first introduced to this book by the writing center at my last institution.  We called it the dancing pencil book because that was what was on the cover of the second edition. As you can...
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STEM Access

Reading Library E-Books

So, finally after last week‘s e-book explanation, this week we will actually read library e-books on the Nook (I feel I should give the Nook a name).  We will download books from OverDrive, EbscoBooks, and Ebrary.  After trying, I am happy that I got a Nook instead of a Kindle because a Nook can read many more e-books especially those that have DRM. I started by downloading Adobe Digital Editions on both my work PC and my home Mac. This is a fairly simple process but does require registering a username with Adobe and authorizing each computer to access the...
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STEM Access

E-Books and DRM and E-Book Distributors

Last week, I said we’d look into downloading books onto the Nook, but I realized that before I could do that I should do some research on e-books and especially library e-books. The standard format for e-books is ePub (except for Kindles which use Mobi) although some ebooks use pdf.  There are many desktop, iOS, Android, and even Blackberry apps that read ePubs.  You can even find plugins so that you can read ePubs on your browser.  In general, any ePub reader will also be able to read a pdf.  ePub e-books are nice because they repaginate when you...
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STEM Access

Email and Web on the Nook

As I mentioned last time, I wanted to be able to use my new Nook to check email.  The Nook comes with an email program.  I wasn’t able to connect easily to my Baylor email account so I gave up.  I’m not sure whether it was something on the Nook side or the Baylor side, but I think it’s because my Baylor account is an Exchange account and that was not an option in the email settings as it would be in regular Android (if I interpreted the Baylor help page correctly).  However, connecting to my Yahoo account was...
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