Once upon a time, journals were made of paper and ink. However, we left the dark ages of dead woods behind us and moved forward to an age in which authors don’t need to publish in journals (but still want to). There’s an increasing decoupling between the individual article and its publishing journal, created by [...]

I am tired of explaining to students that the URL for a database entry they copied and pasted from their browser won’t work. Here is the problem: A student searches for high quality content in a database that the library pays a lot of money for. Finding a great article, they copy and paste the [...]

The new Leiden Ranking (LR) has just been published, and I would like to talk a bit about its indicators, what it represents and equally important – what it doesn’t represent. The LR is a purely bibliometrical ranking, based on data from Thomson-Reuters’ Web of Science database (there’s another bibliometrical ranking, Scimago, but it’s based [...]

“Excuse me; the whole tenure system is ridiculous. A guaranteed job for life only encourages the faculty to become complacent. If we really want science to advance, people should have chips implanted in their skulls that explode when they say something stupid.” Sheldon Cooper, The Big Bang Theory Between the recent ACUMEN (academic careers understood [...]

Earlier this week, my favorite citation management tool Mendeley announced that it had sold itself to a very large, for-profit scholarly publishing company, Elsevier. There have been mixed reactions to this. Mendeley is useful to academics and researchers on several fronts. The desktop application helps folks organize all the PDFs of journal articles that live [...]

I recently taught a fun workshop called “Mobile Apps for Research and Education.”  We talked about some apps to access library databases, then shared some favorite apps for getting work done. The mobile apps for accessing library resources are always a bit weird.  Because libraries and institutions pay lots of money for access to databases [...]

When most folks think about Girl Scouts, they think about cookies.  I love the cookies (peanut butter patties are my favorite) but thinking about Girl Scouts brings to my mind calculus, the glacial border region of Western New York, and the friendships I shared with a remarkable group of women who have all gone on [...]

Last week, the Obama administration issued a directive declaring that scientists have to share the results of their taxpayer funded research. I was happy to hear this, as I have always been a big advocate of sharing (well, my little sister might disagree with the “always” part, but you know what i mean). “But wait [...]

As the sole science librarian at a small liberal arts college, I work with faculty and students in a variety of disciplines. This means that I need to understand the literature of those disciplines, and understanding the literature means knowing at least a little bit about the metrics that are used to measure it: impact [...]

Science seems to be full of controversies and conflicts; famous scientists willing to kill and be killed for their pet theories, former students challenging the views of their academic “parents” and so on. My favorite biology professor used to tell about the time when his post-doc advisor, after a lecture given by his former post-doc [...]