Engineering Info @ Imperial College London Library

The library has recently subscribed to two new e-journals which may be of interest. They are accessible via the library catalogue. 

Earth Science Informatics
This international, English-language journal publishes original, interdisciplinary articles on all aspects of informatics dealing with the Earth system. Earth Science Informatics, as a scientific discipline, focuses on two major aspects: (i) the formal representation of the spatial and temporal relationships between entities in the Earth system and (ii) the design, development, and application of computational tools to acquire, analyze, manage and communicate information about the spatio-temporal dynamics of the Earth system.

Engineering and technology
The IET’s magazine covering science, engineering and technology

Vincent Chu, a civil engineer based in Hong Kong, has published a freely accessible e-book titled 200 Questions and Answers on Practical Civil Engineering Works. It contains many useful questions that civil engineers may come across during their day-to-day work 

A free copy of the book can be downloaded from the Institute of Civil Engineers website.

Here is a list of new books added to the Earth Sciences & Engineering collection in the Central Library in June. 

Please email me at lawrence.jones@imperial.ac.uk if you have any book suggestions.

Just a reminder that the Central Library will be closed from the 28th June to the 6th July to allow the completion of the building work and will re-open with the new ground floor on Monday the 7th July.

Central Library opening hours

If you are registered to use the Digimap Ordnance Survey resource at Imperial College, you would have recently received an email from EDINA explaining that you need to check your registration details and to choose (and provide an answer to) a security question. You have been asked to do this because Digimap will be switching off their Athens access after 31 July 2008.  

From 1 Aug 2008 you will need to login to Digimap via the UK Federation. You won’t notice any great change in accessing the Digimap resource from 1 Aug since accessing Digimap via the UK Federation is very similar to accessing it via Athens. 

But if you have any data saved under your Digimap account (e.g. Carto Bookmarks, MasterMap Downloads) you will need to transfer it over from your Athens account to your UK Federation account before 1 Aug 2008. If you fail to do this, all of your saved data will be lost. 

To transfer over any saved data, this is what you do: 

1. Login to Digimap via the Athens route: see http://edina.ac.uk/digimap/

2. Once you have logged in, you will be prompted to set up a security question (there are a choice of 4 questions such as ‘What was the name of your first school?’)

3. Logout of Digimap as well as Athens.

3. Re-login to Digimap using the ’UK Federation’ route: see http://edina.ac.uk/digimap/

4. Answer the security question you set up earlier via Athens.

5. You should then get a message to say that your saved data has been transferred across.

If you have any queries or problems, please let me know and I will do my best to answer them. The following Digimap guidance sheet site is quite useful:
http://edina.ac.uk/supportstaff/access_notes.html

A new report urges caution against the over-reliance on citation statistics such as the impact factors. The report, entitled Citation Statistics, on the use of citations in assessing research quality (PDF document), was commissioned by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The work based on practices as reported from mathematicians and other scientists from around the world.

The report highlights several common misuses of citation statistics in evaluating research. It cautions that citations provide only a limited and incomplete view of research quality. Research is too important, they say, to measure its value with only a single, coarse tool.

The report argues that the meaning of citations is not well-understood. This means that a citation’s meaning can be very far from ‘impact’, making the objectivity of citations illusory. In addition, while having a single number to judge quality is indeed simple, it can lead to a shallow understanding of something as complicated as research. Numbers are not inherently superior to sound judgements, observes the report.

Here is a list of new books added to the Civil Engineering Dept Library collection this month. Please email me at lawrence.jones@imperial.ac.uk if you have any book suggestions.

has a new ‘Web Search’ feature which allows users to carry out a related search on Google Scholar. There are four options.

1. Article title: search terms (full article title) are input automatically.
2. Author: change the drop down menu to author and the author is input automatically so you can search for articles by that author.
3. Journal title: change the drop down menu to this option and the journal title is input into the search box.
4. The fourth option is to input your own keywords.

This new Web Search feature only appears when there are no full text links available via the menu. It allows users to view the abstract of the article, or if available, an open access copy via an institutional repository.

(’What is SFX?’ you may well be asking: Well with staff & students at Imperial College can access the full text to journal articles from databases the Library subscribes to or from the Library Catalogue. Whenever you see the button, simply click on it to see if the full text to an item is available.)

The Journal Citation information for 2007 is now available at Journal Citation Reports. The Science collection covers over 5,900 titles. Useful information can be gained from the data, including:

* Number of articles published in the journal in for a given year.
* Number of citations to that journal from articles published in a given year.
* Impact factor of the journal, and how it ranks in impact in relation to other journals.

There’s an interesting article in the latest issue of the Journal of Academic Librarianship which assesses the coverage and performance of Google Scholar with regard to engineering material.

Overall, the conclusion is that Google Scholar is doing a good job in covering the engineering literature from the 1990s onwards and that with its easy-to-use interface it is provides a useful tool for accessing the literature. The authors also suggest that Google Scholar “has appeal for” researchers with more advanced information needs; though they “might benefit more by doing their primary searching on Compendex and similar databases”.