Scheduled outage for Mendeley, ScienceDirect, and Scopus / evening of Aug. 01

ATTENTION: If you use any of the following Elsevier products (including ScienceDirect, Scopus, Mendeley and more), please be aware of the following scheduled maintenance outage on Saturday evening, August 1st, starting at 5 PM CDT.

UPDATE: Three of the Elsevier support blog posts discussing this outage can be found here:


Scheduled Service interruption for Elsevier Research Platforms,
Research Intelligence and R&D Solutions on August 1.

Dear Customer,

We would like to give you advance notice of an interruption of service for Elsevier platforms and solutions due to scheduled maintenance.

On Saturday, August 1, access to Elsevier platforms will be unavailable due to a scheduled maintenance for approximately 4.5 hours starting at 06:00 PM EDT. Please check the World Clock Time Zone Converter to convert the time in your local time.

The platforms and solutions involved are:

  • Elsevier Research Platforms: ScienceDirect, Scopus (including Author Feedback Wizard), Engineering Village, Mendeley
  • Research Intelligence: SciVal Funding
  • R&D Solutions: Reaxys, Embase, Geofacets

Each platform will be displaying a warning to users of this scheduled downtime, and during downtime, there will be a message informing users of the temporary unavailability of service.

To stay up to date with any developments follow the individual Twitter accounts for the products.

Thank you for your patience as we strive to update our products.

Elsevier Customer Service Team

April 09 Workshop: Oh The Cites You’ll See!

A researcher will often want to try to find articles in their field of study which are particularly useful to other scholars. But how can you find out which papers are more widely used? Join Michael Manasco and Ron Schwertfeger on April 9th to find out more! Oh The Cites You'll See
Together, Ron and Michael will talk about Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and Scopus (two of the resources available through the UAH Library to help you with your research needs). This session will take place in Room 214 of the UAH Salmon Library, at 12 noon on April 9th.

This session is open to everyone! UAH faculty, staff and students are encouraged to bring their own laptops or tablets, as there will be some practice exercises.

Click here if you need directions to the library from off-campus.

Refined Researchers at a Glance

Scopus working on increasing author visibility and organization

From a recent Scopus blog entry: The new Scopus author profile page has arrived.

Newly revamped, old distractions on the Author Profile page are gone and the best tools remain. For example, if an ORCID ID is associated with a Scopus profile then a link to that ORCID will display on the author detail page. Additionally, a new graph added to the sidebar gives a quick overview of an author’s recent productivity. Best of all, users can sort “Document” and “Cited-by” lists without having to leave the author profile or reload the page.

What this means for you varies on whether or not you have articles indexed by Scopus.

If you do, then your author profile page is a little bit cleaner and has more functions. It provides a convenient glance at most cited articles, co-authors, sources, and the sort. If something is incorrect, look for the link over on the upper right-hand side that says “Request author detail corrections”. Care to see your author page? Then head over to Scopus, click on the Author Search tab, and then search for yourself. Confirm the affiliation and view the page.

Whether or not you have articles indexed by Scopus, you can still make use of this to see what other researchers are doing. Have a big paper for a professor and want to make sure the quantum physicist you are citing is well respected? Well, here is a good way to see the citations and the interactions with the community. You can also subscribe to an author to see when he or she publishes new articles or get alerts, check a few different cross-tab style statistics, and similar sundry.

You can view this screenshot of Dr. Joseph Ng’s page to get a feel.

Sample of a Scopus Author Page

Scopus, click to access (note requires UAH login)

Scopus to start expanding indexing back to 1970

An eye on global research:  50 million records, 21,000 titles, 5,000 publishers

“The interconnectedness of all things,” is the mantra of not-quite-detective (debate remains on whether he is quite holistic) Dirk Gently, and rarely does it reach more of a truth than in research fields, where the understanding the state of the art is as much an understanding-the-context as an understanding-the-content.

Here at the Salmon Library, one of our key resources for seeing how articles and research are interconnected is Scopus: an Elsevier product that helps to see which articles are citing which other articles, how they are being cited, how they are being used in other ways (online mentions, social media mentions), how they relate to the author’s body of work, how the journals in which they are published match up with the field as a whole, and so forth.

Whether you are a professor looking to get published or a student wondering which articles you should prioritize with your capstone project, Scopus can help, and it is about to get bigger.

The Scopus blog has just announced today that the team will begin the Scopus Cited References Expansion project. Among other things, this will track citation data back to 1970, giving a better overall picture of how articles and researchers use other articles and research. For any field of research that needs to go back more than the past couple of decades, this will be invaluable.

To quote from their blog:

The Cited References Expansion project aims to increase the depth of Scopus’ scholarly content while enhancing the ability to use Scopus for evaluation and trend analysis. Moreover, author profiles and h-index counts of researchers who published articles prior to 1996 will be more complete.

The increased indexing will “become apparent” in the fourth quarter of 2014, and should be completed in 2016.

Curious about Scopus and how you can use it? Contact the Reference Desk (phone: 256.825.6528 or email: erefq@uah.edu, see link for more options) and we can help!

New at the Library in 2011


It’s going to be an exciting academic year of change at the UAHuntsville Library in the 2011 – 2012 academic year.  We have a number of new features and resources this year, some which are already here and some that are coming soon.

New furniture, workspaces, and improved study rooms are coming to the library in October.

We hope to have this all installed in the building during Fall Break, and are planning an Open House the week of Homecoming at UAHuntsville.  More information will be coming, but we plan on having a free concert in the building or just outside with local Indie Folk / Acoustic band Ashlyn Maine.

Read more about our new furniture at our earlier blog post, and become a fan of Ashlyn Maine on their Facebook page.

Scopus Database Now Available

Please go to http://www.scopus.com/home.url in order to access the Scopus database now available from the UAHuntsville Salmon Library. Access has been set up via IP Authentication (on-campus only).

Scopus, launched in November 2004, is the largest abstract and citation database containing both peer-reviewed research literature and quality web sources. You can find a wealth of easily accessible information about getting the most from your Scopus access, including demos, tutorials and downloadable user guides at http://info.scopus.com

New Vending Machines on our First Floor

Students have long asked for them, and we’re happy to finally have three new vending machines available on our first floor!  There is a can machine, bottle machine, and also a snack machine available behind the copy machines on the first floor.  Drinks range in price from sixty cents to $1.25, and snacks are available for up to a dollar.

New eBook collections from Springer

A big thank you to the Network of Alabama Academic Libraries (NAAL) for our new access to selected 2011 eBooks from Springer. Ebooks are available in the following collections:

Access Journals from SpringerLink

You have access to approximately 1700 American journal titles from 1997 to present on SpringerLink! The world’s most comprehensive online collection of scientific, technological and medical journals, books and reference works.

Get Searching or Click here for SpringerLink’s featured journal titles by collection

Improved Mobile Access

We’ve improved the mobile version of our website optimized for iPhones so that you can now enjoy more efficient access resources such as LibGuides, Academic Search Premiere, and much more.  You can now also search our catalog directly from your device as well!

If you are using an iPhone or iPod Touch, you will be automatically redirected to the mobile version of our site.  We also hope to have a version compatible with Android devices soon.

We hope you are all settling in well for the new academic year at UAHuntsville!  Remember, you can Ask Us Anything at the Library.  Be sure to Like us on Facebook or Follow us on Twitter for more information.  You can also get in touch with us through either of those resources.  Even if the answer to your question isn’t in the library, we can point you to the best resource on campus to help.

 

 

Scopus database trial now available

Please go to http://www.scopus.com/home.url in order to access the Scopus database trial account now available from the UAHuntsville Salmon Library. Access has been set up via IP Authentication (on-campus only).

Scopus, launched in November 2004, is the largest abstract and citation database containing both peer-reviewed research literature and quality web sources. With over 18,500 titles from more than 5,000 international publishers, SciVerse Scopus offers researchers a quick, easy and comprehensive resource to support their research needs in the scientific, technical, medical and social sciences fields and, more recently, also in the arts and humanities.

You can find a wealth of easily accessible information about getting the most from your Scopus access, including demos, tutorials and downloadable user guides at http://info.scopus.com

Click here to see SciVerse Scopus content coverage at a glance, as of April 2011.

For questions or comments, please give us a call at 256-824-6529 or contact us at http://libanswers.uah.edu.