E-Books and DRM and E-Book Distributors

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Christina Chan-Park

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 zoom in; they also let you change background color and have other cool features.  If you zoom in on a pdf, you have to scroll around to see the different parts of the page.

The problem is that (both public and academic) library e-books come with DRM or Digital Rights Management to limit copying, printing, and sharing of e-books since the library and not the reader owns the book.  Therefore, to read a library e-book, you need to have a reader that is compatible with DRM.  Adobe Digital Editions (for both Mac and PC) is the only desktop reader I can find that can handle DRM.  BlueFire (for both iOS and Android) also works with DRM as do the native applications on various eReaders (Nook, Sony eReader, etc. but not Kindle).

Libraries get their e-books from e-book distributors.  Public libraries general use OverDrive.  At Baylor, we mainly use Ebrary and EbscoBooks.  We also have a significant number of books from myLibrary, Safari (ProQuest), and Knovel.  We also often buy books directly from the publisher (Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, etc. for STEM books).

OverDrive generally has books in both ePub and Kindle formats and occasionally in pdf.  Not all Ebrary, EbscoBooks, or myLibrary books are downloadable.  If they are, they are in .pdf format and have DRM.  Sometimes, you can only download a chapter or a set number of pages at a time.  Ebrary also has both a desk application and a mobile app for both iOS and Android that can read pdfs but not ePub.  Ebsco has plans to make books available in ePub format and is developing mobile apps.  myLibrary allows downloads through Adobe Digital Editions.  Safari books are not downloadable unless you use the Safari iPad app which allows you to read one book at at time.  Knovel books often have interactive features which are only accessible through a web browser, but the text comes as unrestricted pdf.  Books we buy directly from the publisher are less likely to have DRM if they are downloadable.

Next week, actually reading library e-books on the Nook!

Posted in All Scholars, Books, Reading, Websites | 3 Comments

Email and Web on the Nook

Posted on June 14, 2012 by Christina Chan-Park

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 simple although it did take a while to sync the first time.  I linked it as IMAP rather than POP because I wanted my email to stay in the cloud since the Nook will not be my primary email reader.  I decided not to bother trying to connect my gMail accounts even though you can use the mail program with more than one account.  I actually found it easier to use the web browser to read my email.  Exchange, Yahoo, and gMail all have mobile versions that automatically load with the option to go to full web version.  Yahoo kept on asking me to download their Android app; but because the Nook runs on it’s own version of Android, I decided that the app probably wouldn’t work.

The default homepage for the web browser is the Nook home page, but you can change that in the settings.  And it’s easy enough to navigate to other pages.  One slightly annoying feature is that you can’t have multiple tabs open at the same time.  You can have multiple pages open, but it’s a three-touch process to switch pages (open the menu, select new or other windows, select the page you want).  I find it easier to look at the pages in landscape, and there is a setting to make that a hard default.  There is also a setting that allows you to toggle between tablet and desktop browser modes.  I’m assuming the tablet mode goes to mobile websites when possible.  You can pretty much customize the settings (cookies, save passwords, forms, etc) the way you would with a desktop browser.

One thing I was disappointed with was that I couldn’t edit my blog in WordPress using the visual editor (which is one reason why I’m posting this 3 weeks late), but I just realized I can use the html editor.  I was, however, pleasantly surprised that Blackboard seemed to work fine, and I was able to post to discussion boards and download material.  It did take me awhile to find where the downloads went (go to library–>my stuff–>my files–>my downloads).

Another thing I haven’t figure out how to do yet is double click so I can highlight a whole word (like my password) when I type it in wrong.  Anybody have any suggestions?

Next time let’s see if we figure out how to download library books.

Posted in All Scholars, Reading, Websites | 1 Comment

My New Nook Tablet

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Christina Chan-Park

My new nook in it's nifty red case already covered in fingerprints.

For my birthday, my husband who blogs here, bought me a Nook tablet.  Now you have to understand that we are not a smartphone family so a tablet was rather exciting.  I’ve been looking for something to bring on vacation with me that I can use to check and triage email, but only respond if absolutely necessary since typing is not as easy as it would be on a computer.  I also wanted an e-reader so I wouldn’t have to haul books around when traveling (I usually bring alumni magazines and newsletters to read and then just chuck them when I’m through).  My eyes are a little too old to use a smart phone, and I don’t want to be completely plugged in when on vacation.

A tablet seemed to be the answer.  I don’t travel enough to justify paying for an iPad even though I am an Apple user.  I didn’t want to be tied to the Kindle’s proprietary format, and I liked the fact that you can run Android on the Nook from a microSD card.  So, this next series of posts will be on my new Nook.

Even though my birthday was in March, I decided to wait until the semester was over before I would start playing with the Nook.  With working full-time and taking two classes and having out-of-town guests and other family functions, I didn’t need the added distraction of a new toy to keep me from my work.  So, I started playing with it in the beginning of May and wanted to make sure that I had downloaded a few books to read before I went on the faculty/staff retreat at Laity Lodge which in theory does not have internet access.

I found that the Nook is pretty intuitive to use.  It’s pretty easy to find new wireless connections and delete ones you don’t use regularly.  Once you have downloaded books or apps, they’re pretty easy to find and you can arrange them the way you want on your home page.  The night feature for readings books is nice as you can still read in bed and not disturb your roommate or spouse.  I tend to like to read the books in portrait (the lock orientation feature is handy when you’re reading in bed and adjusting positions) and use the web in landscape.  I do find it annoying that the settings menu only works in portrait.

I did find it easier to “buy” books on my computer and have them sync to the Nook (over wireless) than to “buy” them directly from the Nook.  It’s just easier to browse on a bigger screen, and the searching functions seemed better. Although the Nook is Android-based, not all Android apps are available for the Nook which is why I want to be able to run Android from the microSD card.

Being a cheapskate, I haven’t really paid for much for the things I’ve downloaded so far.  I’ve downloaded some digitized out-of-copyright books, some (I’m assuming) self-published free books, and some free (teaser?) books from more mainstream authors.  I also one free app and bought three “classic” collections of 25 novels for 99cents each.  All of the novels are out of copyright so I could have found digitized versions of them all, but I’m hoping that the versions that I paid for are slightly cleaner copies.

Some of the free digitized books have not been cleaned so there are odd characters that creep in and “typos” but nothing too hard to figure out.  Occasionally, the passages will be in the wrong order or repeated which is more annoying.  I also noticed that pagination corresponds to the original printed text and not to the Nook screen so the page numbers don’t change even if you change font size.  On the non-digitized e-books, the pages change with the text.

Next time email and web on the Nook.

Posted in All Scholars, Books, Reading | 1 Comment

Journal Citations and Impact Factor

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Christina Chan-Park

Last week, I talked about H-Index which is a metric for measuring the impact an author has in his field.  This week, I will discuss Impact Factor (IF) which is one way to measure the impact a journal has in a field.

Impact Factors for a journal are available through Journal Citation Reports which is produced by the same company that produces Web of Knowledge.  The simple impact factor for a journal in any given year is the average number of citations in that year of articles from the previous two years.  So if a journal has an impact factor of 2 for 2011, it means that on average all the articles published in 2010 and 2009 in that journal have been cited two times.

Just like an H-Index has more meaning in context, an Impact Factor should also be viewed in context.  Some disciplines have longer times to publication so a 5-Year Impact Factor may yield more about the journal than the standard 2-year Impact Factor.  Also, journals should be compared to other journals in the same field rather than to other fields or all journals.  One can do this using an Aggregate Impact Factor (AIF) which is calculated from all the journals in a field or the Median Impact Factor (MIF) which gives the median value from all the journals in a field.

The trick is figuring out what to use for the field.  Biology (AIF=3.146, MIF=1.339) is listed separately from different different sub-disciplines of biology and medicine (agronomy, biophysics, microbiology, etc).  Likewise there is a general listing for environmental science (AIF=2.496, MIF=1.560), geology (AIF=1.773, MIF=1.049), mathematics (AIF=0.735 , MIF=0.584), neuroscience (AIF=3.914, MIF=2.783), psychology (AIF=2.579, MIF=2.075), and statistics (AIF=1.140 , MIF=0.948), but none for chemistry, computer science, or physics.

It is important to keep in mind that Impact Factor should not be the only way a journal is evaluated.  Especially as there are ways for journals to manipulate to a certain extent their impact factors. In addition because Impact Factor is an average, one paper with a large number citations can skew the average.  If a journal has 10 papers and 9 of them are cited once and one of them is cited eleven times, the Impact Factor is 2 even though the median and modal citation number is 1.

Librarians do consider Impact Factor when subscribing to journals.  An expensive high impact journal or an inexpensive low impact journal but not an expensive low impact journal may be worth subscribing to, but local usage because of research interests of faculty and students may be a more important factor.

Authors often consider Impact Factor when deciding what journal to submit their article to, but the research focus of a journal is also important.  Sure every geologist might want to publish a paper in Nature or Science especially since they publish very few geology articles it’s even more prestigious.  But it might be more effective to publish in Geology since its primary readership are geologists and the primary readership of Nature and Science are non-geologists who will probably just skip or skim the article.

Posted in All Scholars, All STEM, Analyzing, Collecting Data, Networking, Organizing, Reading, Writing | Leave a comment

H-Index

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Christina Chan-Park

As I mentioned last week, I decided that there wasn’t enough interesting about controlled vocabulary to fill up a whole month of posts so I’ve decided to switch topics for this week and next to journal metrics.  The first metric I’m using in some research I’m conducting with a professor, and it’s called the H-Index.

H-Index was originally introduced by J.E. Hirsch as one way of measuring an author’s impact on his field.  The way it works is you order the author’s papers from the most to least cited paper along the x-axis.  Then you graph on the y-axis the number of citations for each paper.  You then draw the line x=y.  The intersection of that line with the line graphing the papers and citations is the H-Index.  So the H-Index gives you the number of papers (n) that have been cited at least n times.  Both Web of Knowledge and Scopus will calculate H-Index for you, and there are various plugins you can use with Google Scholar.

In the example above, this author has written more than 60 papers, some of them have never been cited (not unexpected), but one of them has been cited almost 60 times.  However, his H-Index is 16 because he has 16 papers that have been cited at least 16 times (including the one that has been cited almost 60 times).

Most authors who are reasonably productive will have a graph similar to the one above.  But it is important to remember that H-Index is very context specific.  Presumably more seasoned scholars will have higher H-Index than younger scholars (they have more papers and have had more time for their papers to be cited), and the H-Index “standard” will vary with different disciplines.  Nevertheless, H-Index is growing more popular than just the simple number of publications or the number of total or average citations because it tends not to favor one-hit wonders or people who publish a lot of drivel.

In light of the information above, our research is going to investigate what a reasonable H-Index should be for an assistant professor in his field going up for tenure.  We are also interested to see whether one can “rank” departments based on a cumulative H-Index for all the professors in that department.  This field has both research and clinical components, and we expect that the H-Index for departments that specialize in one area or the other might be quite different.

So, what’s your H-Index?

Posted in All Scholars, All STEM, Analyzing, Networking, Writing | 3 Comments

More Controlled Vocabulary

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Christina Chan-Park

As I mentiWordle: Controlled Vocabularyoned last week, my original theme for the month was to go over controlled vocabulary such as the Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS) used in Scitation and IEEE Xplore, the Mathematics Subject Classification (MCS) used in MathSciNet, and the Computing Classification System (CCS) used in the ACM Digital Library.  But I decided that there wasn’t enough to say to blog about each one separately.

All of them have similar hierarchical structure like MeSH, but without as many tiers.  PACS has up to 5 subheadings, MCS up to 3, and CCS up to 3.  The headings and subheadings are denoted by some combination of numbers and letters.  Interestingly, the categories of the most recent MCS were determined publicly on a wiki.  The time you’re mostly likely need to use them is if you’re submitting an article to an APS/AIP, AMS, or ACM journal and you need to describe the content of your paper.

But looking at the subjects (controlled vocabulary) for a paper can be very helpful if it turns out the word you’re using is actually not the academic/proper term.  For example, we were helping a student the other day who was interested in fracking (or fracing or fraccing as it used to be spelled before Battlestar Galactica popularized the word frak which was originally spelled frack).  Fracking is a hot topic right now because people seem to think it induces earthquakes.  However, when we looked up fracking in GeoRef, we didn’t get many results.  A quick look at the subjects listed under one of the articles, and it dawned on me that hydraulic fracturing, the proper term for the procedure, is what we should have been looking for.  A quick change in our search and (voila!) many results.

Posted in All Scholars, Aviation Science, Computer Science, Databases, Engineering, Mathematics, Organizing, Physics, Reading, Research Process, Writing | 1 Comment

MeSH Descriptors

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Christina Chan-Park

Last week talked about chemistry.  Today we talk about medicine.  Specifically, we will discuss Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).  MeSH is an example of controlled vocabulary which we is our topic for this month.  Controlled vocabulary is used in indexes to describe subjects systematically and consistently, and MeSH descriptors are probably some of the most widely used.  It’s no surprise that MedLine, PubGet, PubMed use MeSH since they’re biology related.  But they’re used in Scopus and IEEE Xplore also.

MeSH were created by the National Library of Medicine and are updated every year.  Currently there are over 26,000 descriptors and 177,000 entry words.  Entry words are terms that you can put into the MeSH Browser to find the appropriate descriptor.

MeSH are hierarchical and arranged in a tree format with up to 12 branches.  The first part of the number consists of letter and a number.  The letter stands for the major subject and the number a subheading.  Subsequent subheadings (i.e. smaller and smaller branches) are separated by a decimal.  So if any of you grind your teeth at night and have to wear a nightguard like I do,  you might have TMJ would be listed as a sub-sub-sub-sub-subheading under Diseases:

  • Diseases [C]
    • Musculoskeletal Diseases [C05]
      • Muscular Diseases [C05.651]
        • Craniomandibular Disorders [C05.651.243]
          • Temporomandibular Joint Disorders [C05.651.243.897]
            • Temporomandibular Joint Dysfunction Syndrome [C05.651.243.897.897]

The major headings are as follows:

  1. Anatomy [A]
  2. Organisms [B]
  3. Diseases [C]
  4. Chemicals and Drugs [D]
  5. Analytical,Diagnostic and Therapeutic Techniques and Equipment [E]
  6. Psychiatry and Psychology [F]
  7. Phenomena and Processes [G]
  8. Disciplines and Occupations [H]
  9. Anthropology,Education,Sociology and Social Phenomena [I]
  10. Technology,Industry,Agriculture [J]
  11. Humanities [K]
  12. Information Science [L]
  13. Named Groups [M]
  14. Health Care [N]
  15. Publication Characteristics [V]
  16. Geographicals [Z]

Publication Characteristics and Geographicals are a little different as they don’t really describe the content of the book or journal article.  There are also a list of 83 qualifiers that are used in conjunction with MeSH.  Learn more about these here.  If you plan to use MeSH headings to search, it’s advisable you read up on how to use the MeSH Browser before you start.

Posted in All Scholars, Biochemistry, Biology, Databases, Neuroscience, Organizing, Reading, Research Process | 1 Comment

CAS Registery Numbers

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Christina Chan-Park

Have you ever met a chemist?  I find that chemists are some of the most organized, meticulous people I know.  I attribute it to the fact that if they’re not careful they’re apt to blow themselves up in lab (although some of them do have a pyromania and enjoy setting things on fire on purpose).

So true to their organized selves, chemists have assigned a unique number to every chemical substance that is recorded in literature.  Every chemical substance!  That’s more than 66 million substances.  About 15,000 new substances are added each day.  (I wonder if they take the weekends off.)

Each substance has a unique 3-part CAS Registry Number.  The substance is simply assigned a number in sequence.  The number has no chemical significance.  The first part has 2 to 7 digits, the second part is is 2 digits, and the last part is a single digit that is a check of the first two parts.

But the reason I even bother mentioning CAS Registry Numbers is that they are used in databases to help search for articles and literature about chemicals.  They are listed SciFinder which is also put out by Chemical Abstract Service which is a division of the American Chemical Society.  But you can also search for a specific chemical using CAS Registry Numbers in Scopus, MedLine, Biological Abstracts, and Inspec.

Posted in All Scholars, Biochemistry, Chemistry, Databases | 1 Comment

Presenting your Data

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Christina Chan-Park

Now that you have decided how to organize your data, how do you present it?  Today’s information is based in part on A.V. Abela‘s popular Chart Chooser diagram which is also available in an interactive form.  Although the chart chooser was designed for presentations, it is handy for papers also.  My main point is you need to know what kind of argument you are presenting with your data.  My second point is that most people can interpret comparisons better than absolutes so you need a reference point for your data.  For example, is 80° a hot or cold day?  It depends on whether it’s January or July.  It depends on whether you’re in Waco, TX, or Anchorage, AK.  All data needs some context.

So, go back to your hypothesis. What did you predict would happen?  Make sure you present your data relative to your prediction.  Did you predict your measurements would match a certain theory or model?  Then plot your data with the theory or model.  If you predicted a change over time, make sure you have a graph that shows that.  Are you comparing Y as you vary X?  Make sure that’s clear in your graph.  Maybe show your results in relation to a standard.  Sometimes your comparison might be on the same figure, sometimes you might be comparing two figures.

A caveat:  If there is a standard format for the data you collect, by all means use it in your results section.  That’s what your readers are expecting.  But in your discussion/analysis section, think about simple creative graphical ways you can show whether your hypothesis has been supported or not.

Posted in All Scholars, All STEM, Analyzing, Organizing, Research Process, Writing | Leave a comment

Organizing Data in your Paper

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Christina Chan-Park

Last time, I mentioned that if you have multiple experiments that you should decide on an order and then stick to that order.  So how do you decide on an order?  Let’s say this is your data

You might decide to order it by shape (squiggles, ovals, diamonds) and then by number (one, two, three).

Or maybe the other way around by number and then by shape.

 

 

Or maybe you decide to order it by color (red, green, purple) and then by shading (empty, solid, striped).  Or by shading then color.

Or by shape and then shading or by color then number.  You get the idea.

 

The point here is that there are lots of different ways to order your data.  None of them is wrong.  Picking an order might be easy because there is a convention that is used in your field.  Maybe you might pick one that makes sense to you.  Or pick one that highlights your findings the best.  Just remember that once you’ve picked an order, stick to it.  All your sections, tables, graphs, etc. should reflect the order you’ve picked.

P.S.  The cards are from a game called Set.  It’s a great game to improve your pattern-recognition skills.  For more information see Set Card Game.

Posted in All Scholars, All STEM, Organizing, Research Process, Writing | 2 Comments