scite is a startup based in Brooklyn, New York, and funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health. With scite, researchers can use "smart citations" to see the context, the location, and the classifications of citation statements. This tool is a work in…

Students often come to college with a limited understanding of how to ethically incorporate and cite source materials in their writing, and this is commonly cited as the leading reason for plagiarism. Studies have shown that students in STEM are more apt to plagiarize as compared to students in the humanities or social sciences, so they are an…

A challenge for instruction librarians is building strong, collaborative partnerships with faculty who value your expertise as both a librarian and a faculty member. This article discusses how a request to "help with citations" evolved into scaffolded information literacy instruction that focuses on the shared value of open resources and…

In 2012, this author published a paper describing a method for using the raw data from Web of Science to examine the journals cited by any given group of researchers and then compare that list to lists of 'top journals' of similar disciplines. It was not a straightforward method to use and required a great deal of effort and spreadsheet work by a…

Industry standards are used in many disciplines, including science and technology areas. To date, little research has been conducted regarding the citing of standards in scholarly publications. The aim of this study was to answer two questions: Are standards being cited in scholarly publications? And, if so, what are the characteristics of the…

The authors analyzed 21,005 citations from 124 Ph.D. theses submitted to ten departments in the Faculty of Science, University of Ibadan, in Nigeria, during the period 2006 to 2013. The overall analysis of the cited information sources revealed that journals (67.6%) were the most cited sources, followed by books/monographs (13.6%), and conference…

This paper explores how students judge scientific news resources, as they might find through a Google search. The data were collected as part of an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded project. Students used a simulated search engine that ensured study participants found the same search results while seeking information for a…

In this paper, we explore how librarians can teach students to deconstruct the concept of authority using questions and considering contextual needs in STEM fields. We argue that examining the complexities of common signifiers of authority, such as peer review, citation rates, and types of sources, as well as exploring contextual factors such as…

Students in Chemistry 254: Organic Chemistry for Majors were required to write a paper about an organic name reaction. Before turning in this assignment, students had the option of attending a one-hour library instruction session covering SciFinder, sources for spectra, ACS Style, and print resources about organic name reactions. Twenty-five…

Plagiarism is a commonly cited problem in higher education, especially in scientific writing and assignments for science courses. Students may not intentionally plagiarize, but may instead be confused about what proper source attribution entails. Much of this confusion likely stems from high school, either from lack of or inconsistent instruction…

Reference management (RM) software is widely used by researchers in the health and natural sciences. Librarians are often called upon to provide support for these products. The present study compares four prominent RMs: CiteULike, RefWorks, Mendeley, and Zotero, in terms of features offered and the accuracy of the bibliographies that they…

Any engineering librarian will tell you that their researchers' literature needs differ from researchers in other disciplines: Books are used less, and conference papers more, than in humanities disciplines. This study analyzes literature cited in theses and dissertations submitted over a three-year period by students in three departments of the…

Impact factors for journals listed under the subject categories "ecology" and "environmental sciences" in the Journal Citation Reports database were calculated using citation data from the Scopus database. The journals were then ranked by their Scopus impact factor and compared to the ranked lists of the same journals derived from Journal…

RefWorks is ideally suited for undergraduate students with team-based research projects as part of their course assessment. The Dorothy Hill Physical Sciences and Engineering Library at the University of Queensland taught students from three engineering courses how to use RefWorks to manage project references and to create team-based…

Can one glimpse the development of emerging scholars in the work of engineering graduate students? To answer this question, the author studied the citation patterns in 96 Master's theses and 24 Ph.D. dissertations completed at Western Michigan University's College of Engineering and Applied Sciences between 2002 and 2006. The hypothesis of this…