Priscilla Finley: May 2007 Archives

Do you need to document how many times your work has been cited? Scholars in the humanities need to hunt in several different places to try to track down citations. Here are a few that UNLV Libraries offers access to:

Arts & Humanities Citation Index (choose the Cited Ref search)
Pros:
• Allows you to track which journal articles cite a particular article, and get an automatic alert when new citations are added
• Systematically searches lists of works cited for articles published in the core literature of each discipline
• Includes fancy tools that let you graph an article’s (supposed) influence for articles published in the social sciences or science (data is not collected about humanities articles, so the "impact factor" does not apply)
Cons:
• Does not index bibliographies in books - you can see if your book has been cited in articles, but citations are not indexed from monographs.
• Extremely fussy search rules – uses only author first initial or first and second initial
• Web of Knowledge tools are calibrated for use in scientific disciplines

Google Scholar
Pros:
• Includes articles from JSTOR and other major commercial collections that you can access by setting UNLV as your home institution in the preferences
• Picks up conference papers, preprints, web pages, and other “grey literature” that may not make it into standard indexes
• Includes cited references for books BUT their cited reference system only searches what’s available to Google Scholar
Cons:
• Only Google knows what’s in there and they aren’t telling
• Hard to narrow down a search to core literature in a field; try the advanced search options to limit search to broad subject area ("Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities")
• Links to books may show 1-2 pages but will not reveal the whole book

Scopus
Pros:
• easier to use than AHCI
Cons:
• limited coverage in the humanities

Citation indexes don't systematically harvest items that have been cited in book chapters and books in most disciplines. Here are a few places you can search through the full text of published books:

Booksearch x 3 runs a simultaneous search in three major searchable book collections: Amazon A9, Google Books and MSN Live Book Search. This is a keyword search so I recommend searching variants of your name in quotation marks ("priscilla finley" "finley, p.") with a keyword from your book or article title if needed.

The same strategies can be effective in ebrary and netLibrary, which search a selection of recent academic titles.

UNLV students, faculty and staff need never pay for access to articles from the NY Times. UNLV Libraries has you covered!

For the daily reader who wants to scan headlines and see photos, it makes sense to visit NYTimes.com to browse the day's news.

A few features like op-ed pieces and articles published between 1981 and two weeks ago are limited to Times Select subscribers. You can get free access to Times Select articles with your unlv.edu email address!

[[UPDATE 9/19/07 - Dear TimesSelect Subscriber,

We are ending TimesSelect, effective today.

The Times's Op-Ed and news columns are now available to everyone free of charge, along with Times File and News Tracker. In addition, The New York Times online Archive is now free back to 1987 for all of our readers.

Why the change?

Since we launched TimesSelect, the Web has evolved into an increasingly open environment. Readers find more news in a greater number of places and interact with it in more meaningful ways. This decision enhances the free flow of New York Times reporting and analysis around the world. It will enable everyone, everywhere to read our news and opinion - as well as to share it, link to it and comment on it.

We thank you for your support of TimesSelect, and hope you continue to enjoy The New York Times in all its electronic and print forms.]]

The complete New York Times archives are also searchable through links from the UNLV Libraries web site. The Historical New York Times Archive offers PDF images of newspaper pages from 1851-2003. Magazine and book review pages are included.

To run a search that includes articles from after 2003, or if you wish to search other major metropolitan newspapers in addition to the Times, use ProQuest National Newspapers from the library web site. Full text of articles from the East Coast Late Edition is available from June 1, 1980 to the current day's paper. The New York Times Magazine and the New York Times Book Review are both available from 1997 forward and may be searched in combination with other papers or separately.

Access to the full text of articles from the New York Times is also available through Lexis Nexis Academic (1980-current) and
Factiva (most recent three months) for users accustomed to these search interfaces.

Occasionally an article or photo will be removed from the online archives as a result of a court case that limited the rights of newspapers to republish the work of certain freelancers in digital format. Citations to these articles or photos appear in the database along with a note that the content has been removed. These articles or photos are almost always available on microfilm, which you can use on the second floor of Lied Library.

Another search option is to use Google's news archive search. Direct access to articles found using this search is most often pay-per-view; however, if you have set up academic access to Times Select you can bypass the $4.95 fee for articles published after 1981. If you haven't set up Times Select or need an older article, use the citation information to locate the same article in the Historical New York Times Archive.

Pay-per-view articles from other papers that you find through the Google News Archive may also be available through one of UNLV's online newspaper collections. To find out if a particular paper is available, search for the title or city on the list of UNLV's print and online journal subscriptions, which will tell you what dates are available for each paper and link you to the online source.

I've put together a couple of prototype web gadgets to quickly connect to UNLV Libraries web services in case any users of iGoogle (Google Home Page widgets) want to experiment with them. I expect eventually we'll make them look more professional and post them on the library web site.

To use them, log into your iGoogle account (or create one) and choose Add Stuff >>, then Add by URL (in tiny letters next to the search box on the Add Stuff page). Paste in the URLs below to try the gadgets.

UPDATE 10/23/2007: They are posted - learn more at a workshop this Thursday from 12:30-1:30. Sign up here!
Quick links to services (databases, ILLiad, my account...)
http://priscilla.finley.googlepages.com/unlvlibquik2.xml

Search UNLV Library Catalog
http://priscilla.finley.googlepages.com/unlvcat2gadget.xml

Search UNLV print and online journal list
http://priscilla.finley.googlepages.com/unlvjournalgadget.xml

Slim RSS Reader is a good choice if you want to dedicate a gadget to reading UNLV Libraries News items

MeeboMe gadget

I also played around with a MeeboMe gadget but there's no point installing it since there's no one to talk to at the other end. It will be an interesting possibility for Ask a Librarian in the future, I think.

If you try any of these out, I'd love to hear whether you think they're useful! I haven't really integrated iGoogle into my habits, but I can see how some users might appreciate having sets of tools ready to use like that.