Well I've been pretty frustrated this week. Hoping to get some suggestions from this week's lectures I popped into ISI. I actually have access to Science Citation Index from work and I tried it at the suggestion of one of my co-workers but had no luck. I thought I would try again to see if maybe I would have more success after exploring with short assignment two. Still nothing.
Luckily I decided to download "Publish or Perish". I found many articles by my scientist have indeed been cited. It seems that in the ISI databases she is Santos LR (first initial, middle initial) and not Santos LA* (truncated first name) as I assumed. I didn't even discover this when I tried the ISI author search function as I was looking for her full name alphabetically (silly library student). I should have known from Prof. Marsteller's anecdote about the Google Scholar and his discovery that his name was being misspelled.
Google Scholar is another spot I checked out a while ago but didn't feel like I had much success with. I didn't notice the name listing only that the articles I came up with were pretty much what I found in my library search and with many I couldn't access the full text as I could with the library finds. When I finally had the name thing figured out I discovered that yes my scientist has been cited. In fact several of her articles have be cited upwards of 20 times. Although she did not show up in the Researcher ID area or Essential Science Indicators. Maybe I'm doing something wrong there too?
One of the features that I think would be of particular interest to someone new to the field would be the "related records" function. If you start from one article not only can you go backward and forward with citations but you can also find articles that would most likely be related to your starting point through shared citations. Most likely if the new article is citing similar work the topic and focus of the paper will also be similar. In this way you can see what others in the field are doing.
Doing the citation search also yields possible subject headings. For my search on Laurie Santos the articles were tagged in 18 different subject area. Having looked at many of her articles through EBSCO I knew I could exclude several such as Tropical Medicine and Public, Environmental and Occupational Health. However, if I had not known that Dr. Santos most recent writing focused on the economic behavior of non-human primates I would have excluded the Economics area. I would suggest to any new explorer to check unusual subject areas in case a scientist has branched out or who's work may be multidisciplinary. These unusual subject areas may lead to unanticipated resources.
15 years ago
3 comments:
I'm glad you mentioned keeping options open for multiple disciplines. My scientist seems to be combining so many different areas that I'm struggling to think of any discipline that is "traditionally studied in isolation" Perhaps my new approach should be disciplines that are not normally studied in conjunction with a science discipline- such as Economics as you found.
I was considering downloading "publish or perish" too. I know we went over it in lecture, but did you find it an easy to use tool with relevant information for your scientist? You don't delve into a whole lot of detail about it which kind of doesn't seem like a good sign.
I was worth playing around with and did have statistical data such as cites per paper, cites per year and h-index. However, even with the topic filters you may still have to manually filter out authors with a name similar to the author you are investigating. I'm still pretty new to all this so am still thinking about how I would utilize this information.
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