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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Library 411

Zotero, for your last minute citing needs

We know that this time of year, students are scrambling to finish up papers and projects. Often, people leave the citation to the last minute. If you need help citing your sources, consider using Zotero, a great citation management tool. Even though Zotero can do much more than just provide citations for sources – it actually walks you through your entire research process from beginning to end – you would do good to download a copy of the program and put it to use for your end of semester projects. There are no more Zotero workshops scheduled for this...
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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

Book Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

  From time to time, I will review books that have to do with STEM.  Some of them will be very practical like Scientific English and some of them more general interest like today’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. This book made many “best book” lists a few years ago.  I remember the first time I tried to check it out…it had already gone missing.  I figured that it was so popular and so interesting that someone didn’t want to give it back.  But never fear, we now have two hardback editions and a paper edition of the...
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Uncategorized

Invest in your financial future @ Money Smart Week

If you are getting ready to graduate, then move into that first job and have not thought about planning for retirement, this is your wake-up call.  Similarly, if you are graduating and have considered how to start planning for retirement, this is your opportunity.  Wondering how to start a personal budget – no problem!  We have answers for you. During the week of April 23-30, the libraries will be celebrating Money Smart Week.  What is Money Smart Week you ask?  Money Smart Week was started by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and continued as a partnership with the...
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Uncategorized

Discovering Archives

Recently a family discovered not one, but seven rare baseball trading cards of Ty Cobb in their grandfather’s attic. The cards are more than a century old and may be worth a million dollars. Wow, if all discoveries were this financially rewarding. Not as financially rewarding, but still generating amazement were the discoveries of Dr. Beth Barr’s HIS 1307 students as they examined the archives of the archaeologist Dame Kathleen Kenyon. Dame Kenyon was instrumental in excavations in the Holy Land and her work excavating the mound in Jericho resulted in a book which “largely rewrote the history of ancient...
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STEM Access

Scopus

Today, I’m going to blog about Scopus to follow up on my last post on Web of Science and Cited Reference Search.  Scopus is not as complicated as WoS as it is just one database with its own interface.  Originally, Scopus data only went back to 1996, but they are in the process of adding records going back to 1970 and should be done in a year or two. Just like in WoS, the simplest way to find in Scopus where/wheter an article has been cited is to search for the article and look on the left side to...
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STEM Access

Web of Science

A long time ago, I blogged about Cited Reference Searches and mentioned that Web of Science and Scopus were the two main databases that have this feature.  So, today I thought I would go into more detail about how a cited reference search works in Web of Science and later this week in Scopus. I need to start with a few preliminary comments about Web of Science.  First of all, for a few years Web of Science had an identity crisis and was known as Web of Knowledge because the company decided that the name was too restrictive since...
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Finding demographics — It’s easier than you think!

Having to search for demographics can cause some people to have a meltdown and just totally avoid the task all together.   But it can be easier than you think if you know the right tools to use.  Knowing how to navigate the Census Bureau can be a life saver whether you are a student looking for information for a business plan or the average business person and knowing the right places to look can make this easier than you think. One super easy way to go is to use the American FactFinder.  This can be found a couple of...
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Library 411

PsycINFO, Your Secret Weapon Database

The Baylor librarians often point undergraduate students to the Academic Search Complete database when they are first starting a research project. It’s no secret why we do – it’s a great multidisciplinary database, which indexes journals from all sorts of subjects from the sciences, social sciences and humanities. No matter your topic, you’ll most likely find some great research materials through there. But I’ve got a tip about a great database to use for a lot of topics, even though it’s not normally considered a multidisciplinary database: PsycINFO. That’s right, the gold standard of psychology databases, produced by the American...
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