Measuring research impact with Altmetric

YSJ offers a new way to measure research impact through a subscription to Altmetric. This service is designed to offer an alternative to journal impact factors (impact factors measure importance by quantifying how many times and where in the scholarly literature research has been cited). Altmetric looks at where research is mentioned in grey literature like government reports, popular media, social media, online and elsewhere. It is particularly good for getting a quick early snapshot of who is talking about research and where.

Altmetric will automatically analyse all research outputs uploaded to RaY and there are a number of different ways to explore the data. More information on how Altmetric works is available on the ILS website.

Newspaper archives - what is available here?

Increasingly researchers are able to use online archives of newspapers, recent and more historic, as part of their resource searches.  Having recently added some new services to our portfolio in ILS, we thought it was worth rounding up what is now available to you. All of these are accessible via the databases page on the ILS website.

17th-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers

The newspapers, pamphlets and books gathered by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757-1817) represent the largest and most comprehensive collection of early English news media.

19th Century British Library Newspapers

19th Century British Library Newspapers contains full runs of influential national and regional newspapers, representing different political and cultural segments.

British Newspapers 1600-1900

A combined search tool for the two collections above.

FT.com

FT.com interative provides access to the full text of the global editions of the Financial Times to search and browse the archives, including interactive features and extra reports on industry sectors and companies.

Historical Newspapers

Searchable full text, full page, and article-level images from the archives of The Guardian, The Observer and The New York Times, 1791-2003.

InfoTrac Custom Newspapers

Full text, up to the present day, of UK newspapers, including The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent.

UK Press Online (ON CAMPUS ACCESS ONLY)

A British tabloid newspaper archive, covering the Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Daily Star and other major titles.

New ebook packages

ILS has recently purchased some ebook packages from Palgrave, to enhance our holdings in the areas of Religion and Philosophy, Social Sciences, Education, Literature, and Media and Culture.  Our systems team has been hard at work making these titles searchable in the library catalogue, and you can also can see what is available and access the books at

• http://capitadiscovery.co.uk/yorksj/items/110904  
• 
  
• Any titles which are in the packages we have bought are available to download in full as a PDF, or to send to a Kindle, as well as having a read online option.  We hope these are helpful to you in your research.

New library catalogue

Summer is a busy time for academic libraries! We've been able to implement a new library management system (behind the scenes system that should improve our efficiency and record-keeping) which comes along with a shiny new library catalogue. Visitors to the ILS homepage should have seen it and used it already but for those of you who haven't, here is a little snapshot:

Isn't it great? You should see improved relevance with books ranked highest in your list of results. Quite a few graduate researchers spent a good chunk of time with us, working out some of the bugs and optimising the look and feel in May of this year, so thanks very much to you for that. For those of you who miss Discover and want to keep searching there, you can still find it from the 'Databases' page, which is linked to from the ILS homepage.

At the moment, we're still working on a few aspects relating to article search (or 'search everything' as it appears in the catalogue). You may well find that the catalogue is not a great place for you to look for articles, and in that case, we would encourage you to go to straight to your discipline-specific scholarly databases. Though there are some advantages of searching with a federated search tool like our catalogue (looking across disciplinary lines, saving a bit of time by searching from all providers at once), there are many more advantages of searching in the correct databases. You will get much more precise search results and be able to search in discipline-appropriate ways; things that can be eroded when databases are merged into one interface.

Search strategies and high-quality databases are just the type of thing that make your academic liaison librarian's eyes glow with joy. Please book a tutorial  if you'd like to make sure you're getting the most out of the resources we subscribe to.

Masculinity in Literature

In an effort to bring added value to their scholarly articles, Routledge have created a cross-journal collection of articles which address 'masculinity in literature'. The publisher describes it thus:

This collection looks at the construction of manhood alongside sexual orientation, race and class, and within specific historical situations. The featured articles explore a range of media, regions and time periods as the authors contend with the concept of masculinity and how it has been defined in popular culture.

 All articles in the collection are free to access until October 2015 and might be of interest to those of you whose research addresses gender. Enjoy!

Access to ~2000 new STM-related journal titles

Earlier this year, York St John started subscribing to Elsevier's Freedom Collection which includes access to about 2000 science, technology and medicine (STM) journal titles. You may well have already accessed articles from the collection via Discover, because all the content is findable there. If you wanted to search only in this collection, you can so do from ScienceDirect.

And here's a quick guide to getting the most out of your ScienceDirect searches.

New Database of Psychological Experiments

Are you incorporating psychological experiment results into your research? You might find some interesting results in Psychological Experiments Online. YSJ recently began a subscription to this database, which describes itself as

"a multimedia collection of over thirty important psychological experiments of the 20th and 21st centuries, including the Stanford Prison Experiment, Pavlov's dogs, Halo effect and the Bystander effect. The database includes video clips, website links, interviews with psychologists, suggestions for classroom activities and access to supporting theories and literature."

The Bobo Doll  Experiment. Image taken from Psychological Experments Online.

I find the database fascinating, even if it has (as yet) has no bearing on my own research. Beware, you may start clicking on the collection relating to Albert Bandura's Bobo Doll Experiment of 1961 (which 'demonstrated that children will model their behaviors on those they have seen even without any reinforcement or encouragement') and find you've spent an hour unexpectedly exploring the study of aggression in humans. Ooops. Enjoy.

A makeover for our databases page

We've redesigned our databases webpage so you can filter by subject or see the whole list alphabetically. Short descriptions of each resource are included, which might introduce you to tools you've never used before. Leave us a comment to let us know what you think.

DigiMap Training 14 January

YSJ recently purchased access to the DigiMap Ordnance Survey database in order to support the new Human Geography course. You can use DigiMap 'to view, annotate and print maps from a variety of geospatial data providers ... [as well as] download geospatial data for use in CAD and GIS systems.'

If maps might be useful to your research, have a look at DigiMap (you'll need to register with the service first). YSJ is hosting a training on DigiMap on Wednesday 14 January 2015 from 9:00-11:30AM. You find out more and register using this form, or contact Leah if you have any further questions.

New Arts and Humanities Databases

Anyone doing research in the Arts and Humanities will be pleased to know that we have purchased access to ProQuest's Art, Design and Architecture database collection. ProQuest describes the collection as:

Image of the ProQuest Art, Design and Architecture Collection homepage

"A comprehensive survey of current publications in the fields of visual and applied arts. This collection includes the specialist indexes ARTbibliographies Modern (covering modern and contemporary art), Design and Applied Arts Index (for all aspects of design and crafts) and the International Bibliography of Art (covering scholarship on Western art history), together with a complementary collection of current full-text journals, Arts and Humanities Full Text."

Two New Open Access Journals - Geo and Burnout Research

In cooperation with the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), Wiley has launched a new open access environmental and geographical journal called Geo. Similarly, Elsevier have launched a new open access journal called Burnout Research which will be covering the cross-disciplinary phenomenon of burnout.

What's interesting about these titles, apart from the content which might be relevant to your research, is the fact that they're both published by major for-profit publishers and that both are peer-reviewed. Burnout Research and Geo are far from rare in these respects of course, but there is a persistent misconception that open access means lack of scholarly rigour or publisher support.

To publish in either of these titles, authors would pay an article processing fee (APC) of between $750/£440 - $1,800/£1,150. Authors are also able to choose which copyright license to use. This license dictates how the author themself (as well as others) may redistribute the article, regardless of the fact that '[a]ll articles published Open Access will be immediately and permanently free for everyone to read, download, copy and distribute' according to Elsevier.

Though certain scholarly societies have in the past been resistent to open access publishing, Geo's support from the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) demonstrates that APCs might help to fund scholarly societies in the way that subscriptions formerly did. Many societies which formerly opposed open access have modified their policies and launched their own OA journals.

If you're interested in more about open access and what types of journals you might find in your research area, check out last week's post.

New Journals for Film and Performativity

YSJ has purchased access to 2 new journals of interest to those working with concepts of adaptation.

Adaptation from Oxford University Press

Image courtesy of OUP

“…is an international, peer-reviewed journal, offering academic articles, film and book reviews, including both book to screen adaptation, screen to book adaptation, popular and ‘classic’ adaptations, theatre and novel screen adaptations, television, animation, soundtracks, production issues and genres in literature on screen. Adaptation provides an international forum to theorise and interrogate the phenomenon of literature on screen from both a literary and film studies perspective.”   More from the journal's website...

Image courtesy of Intellect

Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance from Intellect offers

“…historical, theoretical, practice-based or pedagogy-orientated considerations and discussions of adaptation and translation processes and practices in/for performance in the context of one or more of the following areas: theatre; film; television; dance; music; opera; audio-culture; gaming; graphic narratives.” More from the journal's website...

These subscriptions (and many others) will be live from January 2014. To find out more about what ILS offers to Arts researchers and to make requests for new resources, contact your Academic Liaison Librarian, Lottie Alexander.

Jealous? You also have an Academic Liaison Librarian in charge of resource acquisition. Find out who she is here.

British National Formulary

Attention health researchers! YSJ will have access to the British National Formulary (BNF) and the British National Formulary for Children (BNFC) starting in January.

The BNF is:

"Compiled with the advice of clinical experts this essential reference provides up-to-date guidance on prescribing, dispensing and administering medicines.

It details all medicines that are generally prescribed in the UK, with special reference to their uses, cautions, contra-indications, side-effects, dosage and relative costs.

The BNF reflects current best practice as well as legal and professional guidelines relating to the use of medicines. It is intended for use by prescribers as well as by pharmacists, nurses and other health-care professionals."
More from the BNF website

For more information on resources for Health and Life Sciences, contact Jane Munks or Victoria Watt.