Hosting Inspec on Engineering Village or Web Science: A case study in comparing database platforms

Purpose – As library budgets continue to constrict, librarians will need to become more familiar with comparing database host platforms. This paper aims to compare Inspec on Elsevier’s Engineering Village (EV) and Clarivate’s Web of Science (WOS) from a novice user experience. The main objectives are to identify some R1 institutions that subscribe to Inspec and highlight some of the key differences between the two platforms. Design/methodology/approach – Information on Inspec was gathered from various sources as well as the home website, IET, and the host platform websites of Elsevier and Clarivate Analytics. Data was also collected from brochures and guides to help illustrate some of the main features and differences that novice users would be familiar with. Findings – Most institutions subscribe to Inspec via the Engineering Village platform. Results from the study conclude that Engineering Village was selected over Web of Science for hosting Inspec due to a more user-friendly interface, potential lower cost, and faster platform updates, in response to meeting user needs. Originality/Value – Much of the literature focuses on the unfamiliar details and not so much on the novice user. This paper provides a unique perspective in how a novice user would prefer the attributes of one host platform from the other. Additionally, the same review criteria can be applied in other subjects and disciplines

Hydrogen-bonded liquid crystals with broad-range blue phases

We report a modular supramolecular approach for the investigation of chirality induction in hydrogen-bonded liquid crystals. An exceptionally broad blue phase with a temperature range of 25 °C was found, which enabled its structural investigation by solid state 19F-NMR studies and allowed us to report order parameters of the blue phase I for the first time

Bibliometrics : an overview

Research support is an expanding area of activity for libraries in the HE sector. At the University of Hull, the recent reorganisation of Library and Learning Innovation involved a redistribution of expertise to meet the changing needs of the University, its staff and students. As part of this, a new Research Services Team was created to meet the needs of the research community and so contribute to a key strategic aim of increasing the quantity and quality of research outputs

Author Identifiers in Scholarly Repositories

Bibliometric and usage-based analyses and tools highlight the value of information about scholarship contained within the network of authors, articles and usage data. Less progress has been made on populating and using the author side of this network than the article side, in part because of the difficulty of unambiguously identifying authors. I briefly review a sample of author identifier schemes, and consider use in scholarly repositories. I then describe preliminary work at arXiv to implement public author identifiers, services based on them, and plans to make this information useful beyond the boundaries of arXiv.Comment: 10 pages. Based on a presentation given at Open Repositories 200

Disambiguating Yourself : Online Identity Management for Researchers - A Quick User Guide

The citation impact of academic authors is normally analysed using one or more of the following tools: Scopus (or SciVal, based on Scopus data), Web of Science, or Google Scholar. University ranking tables, such as the THES World University Rankings, also rely on citation data derived from these tools. It is therefore important that citation data compiled by these systems are as accurate as possible. Strathclyde researchers should therefore ensure they maintain their online identities within key research intelligence tools thus guaranteeing they receive academic credit for their research outputs. When an author publishes for the first time they are automatically assigned a Scopus ID (by Scopus - Elsevier) and/or a ResearcherID (by Web or Science – Thomson-Reuters). For name disambiguation reasons, identifying authors correctly can be problematic for Scopus and Web of Science and this can often mean that citations are either omitted or misassigned for outputs that belong to an individual’s publication history. This issue is often compounded by the numerous institutional affiliations authors may acquire during their career which, when combined with challenges surrounding name disambiguation, can make the correct assignation of citations very difficult. Sometimes authors may find that they have several identities within Scopus or Web Science thereby diluting their overall citation impact. Fortunately most of the above noted tools recognise that their data can be inaccurate and all therefore provide functionality such that authors can update data held about their research outputs