Historic data in analog (or print) format is a valuable resource that is utilized by scientists in many fields. This type of data may be found in various locations on university campuses including offices, labs, storage facilities, and archives. This study investigates whether biological data held in one institutional university archives could be…

Microsoft Academic (MA) claims to be an academic search engine that uses knowledge discovery, machine learning, and semantic inference to help users search for scholarly information in new and better ways. However, this is not the first iteration of Microsoft Academic. Since its debut in 2004 as Microsoft Academic Search (MAS) (Ortega &…

Search result retrieval was compared across eight research literature databases (AGRICOLA, AGRIS, BIOSIS, CAB Direct, FSTA, Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science) for three topics from different agricultural disciplines to compare retrieval results based on searcher experience. Precision, recall, and uniqueness were analyzed by rating search…

Preprint articles are available on servers, such as arXiv and ChemRxiv, at no-cost to benefit the movement toward open access of research. However, the use of preprint research articles as a reference source in academia is not heavily documented. To examine if researchers are utilizing preprint articles, this paper examines citation trends in the…

Awareness of faculty research interests is an important aspect of a subject librarian's responsibilities. This paper illustrates the potential of Voyant Tools, an application in wide use among digital humanities researchers, to reveal word patterns in the research output of applied science faculty. A corpus of recent article citations from Web of…

In scientific and academic circles, the value of Google Scholar as an information resource has received much scrutiny. Numerous articles have examined its search ability, but few have asked whether it has the accuracy, authority and currency to be trustworthy enough for scholars. This article takes a look at reliability factors that go into Google…

As data as a scholarly object continues to grow in importance in the research community, librarians are undertaking increasing responsibilities regarding data management and curation. New library initiatives include assisting researchers in finding data sets for reuse; locating and hosting repositories for required archiving; consultations on…

The purpose of this study was to reveal influential journals used by life scientists; journals not currently included in "BIOSIS Previews," but included in either "PubMed" or "Science Citation Index Expanded". These 252 journals were revealed by the Eigenfactor, an iterative ranking scheme which quantitatively measures the scientific influence of…

The author sought to determine to what extent the two search engines, Scirus and BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engines), would be useful to first-year university students as the first point of searching for chemical information. Five topics were searched and the first ten records of each search result were evaluated with regard to the type of…

In 2002, plans to merge Penn State's Physical Sciences Library and Mathematics Library provoked a controversy in the Eberly College of Science over the size of the library needed to support its departments. The College contended that a physical collection no more than 5 years old was adequate. A study of astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, physics,…