Scholarly Communication

RSS Feed Available for NU-Authored Articles

I’ve created an RSS feed for anyone who would like to be alerted when new scholarly articles are published by NU-affiliated authors. It pulls information from Web of Science, which includes not only the Science Citation Index but also the Arts and Humanities Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index. In total, Web of Science indexes over 10,000 journals, including open-access titles. For current NU faculty, students, and staff: Click here to add the feed to your RSS reader of choice. ⇒ Using this version of the feed will allow you to click through to view more details about an article within Web of Science even if you’re off-campus. (You’ll be prompted to enter your myNEU username and password from off campus.) For alumni and members of the public: Click here to add the feed to your RSS reader of choice. ⇒ This feed still provides complete bibliographic citations for new articles, but if you’re off-campus, you will be unable to access further information, such as the abstracts, via Web of Science. Note: Google Chrome requires a plugin/extension in order to handle RSS feeds correctly, however, Internet Explorer and Firefox are two browsers that work well. Please let me know if you have any difficulties with this feed.

Northeastern Researchers Study Gossip

Northeastern researchers recently published a study on the impact that negative gossip has on the brain’s ability to remember a person or face. According to their research, test subjects were more likely to remember a person if they heard a piece of negative gossip about them when they were shown a picture of that person’s face. If volunteers spent more time hearing positive connotations about a person they were more likely to forget their face. Interestingly, Dr. Lisa Barrett, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, believes that the result of this study directly helps people remember and avoid people who may cause them harm. Snell Library also contains some resources on the subject like the online report, The Relative Effect of Positive and Negative Humorous Gossip on Perceptions of the Gossiper and the Target of the Gossip, which discusses a study on the perceptions and effects of gossip and gossipers. Other related articles can be found by doing a Discovery or NuCat search on the library’s homepage (www.lib.neu.edu) for subjects like “gossip”, “psychology of the brain”, “memory”, etc. You can also view Northeastern’s recent interview with Lisa Feldman Barrett discussing her study on YouTube. In addition, you can find more of her work in IRis, Northeastern’s Institutional Repository.

Northeastern Researchers Make the Cover of Nature

Our very own Northeastern researchers have offered a new look towards “merging the tools of network science and control theory” to better control complex systems. Their findings were featured on the cover of the May 12th issue of the journal Nature. Albert-László Barabási, a professor in the Departments of Physics and Biology and in the College of Computer and Information Science, and Yang-Yu Liu, a postdoctoral research associate in Physics, coauthored the paper, along with an MIT colleague. Their focus was to merge control theory with network science research in order to create more efficient methods of gaining control of a complex system, such as cellular networks or social media, by identifying the driving nodes of the system. Read more about their research in this news@Northeastern press release. You can also find more of Professor Barabási’s research publications in IRis, Northeastern’s institutional repository. Congrats to our NU researchers for this inspiring breakthrough!

Snell's Corbett Presents at ACRL Annual Conference

Snell Library’s Scholarly Communication Librarian, Hillary Corbett, presented a poster at the Annual Conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries in Philadelphia at the end of March. Hillary’s presentation demonstrated how the power of Google Analytics helps her to market an important library service: IRis, our institutional repository.  She has used Google Analytics to study how the research created at Northeastern is used and cited by writers and scholars around the globe.  This helps make a persuasive case for all you Northeastern researchers to archive your work in IRis! The poster is available here in IRis, along with thousands of other papers, presentations, and documents by Northeastern researchers. Ten other librarians from Snell also attended the conference, including Dean Will Wakeling, pictured above with Hillary Corbett in the exhibit hall at the Philadelphia Convention Center.

How Has the NIH Public Access Policy Affected You?

Heather Joseph at SPARC writes, “It’s hard to believe, but April 7, 2011 will mark the 3rd Anniversary of the implementation of the policy opening up access to articles reporting on the results of NIH-funded research.” (Read more about the NIH Public Access Policy here.) SPARC is gathering stories from authors as well as readers about how having wider access to taxpayer-funded research has affected them. Joseph continues:
The policy has shown tremendous signs of success. PubMed Central now contains more than 2 million full text articles reporting on the latest NIH-funded research, and nearly a half million individuals access these articles each day. With this new wealth of information now available, we’d like to know what your experience has been with it. Specifically, we’d like to hear: 1. How have you been using the database? 2. Have you used the articles to help inform yourself about new developments in a specific area? 3. Has the availability of these articles through PubMed Central helped you advance your research in ways that would not have occurred if they were not available? 4. Have articles that you have authored appeared in PubMed Central as a result of the policy? 5. Have you been contacted by other researchers who have found your work in the database, or vice versa? 6. Have you taken any of the articles to your doctor or other health care provider? 7. Has your healthcare provider used this database as a resource? (if you don’t know, please ask her/him!) 8. Has the availability of the articles in PMC had an impact on how you (or anyone in your community) manage your health care? We’ve heard from people who have used the latest research in various ways, and the stories are extremely powerful. If you have one, please share it! It will help us to not only ensure that PubMed Central remains open as an important public resource, but also to make the case to open up additional publicly funded databases from HHS and other federal agencies as well.
If you’d like to contribute your story about PubMed Central and the NIH Public Access Policy, you can e-mail Heather Joseph directly at heather@arl.org. (Source: http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/issues/nih/nih_action/callforstories.shtml)