Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Social networking growing for scientists?

I have to admit that I personally have doubts about the effectiveness of social networking. I have declined several invitations to join LinkedIn in the past few months. However, I suspect that it is a facet of my personality rather than lack of value within the products themselves. For me, cultivating an online network requires time and effort that I personally tend to expend elsewhere. However, I was very interested to find that quite a few scientific social networks have been developed since I last looked into that sort of thing.

  • Lasilio has a literature search component.
  • Bamboo has liberal arts institutions as part of its focus.
  • Ologeez has a great name and is tied to Pubmed
  • Scilink has more than 40,000 members.
  • and there are so many more
These networks are discussed by Gerry McKiernan, librarian at Iowa State University, in his blog, SciTechNet.

Do check out these networks if you're so inclined, and let the Eckerd community know which you have joined by leaving a comment here.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

200 open access journals from Bentham


Prof. Meylan brought a new open access resource to my attention: Bentham Open. Bentham aims to provide more than 200 open access journals in Science, technology and medicine. At least one, but often several, journals are featured in each of the following subjects:

Most are being indexed by Google Scholar, and Chemical Abstracts has also picked up a number of journals. This means that the journal articles will appear when searching Scifinder Scholar.