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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!

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)

March Madness at Snell!

March Madness: Helpful Hints for a Successful Semester

Spring break has come and gone and now students are gearing up for their own March Madness—that final stretch of the semester when the weeks race by and then, BAM, papers are due and final exams have arrived. Ready or not, it’s time to start getting research together for whatever projects you may have and Snell Library is here to help you find what you need. Check out the hints below to learn how Snell can help you get the wheels in motion:

Ask a Librarian! Seriously—they know their stuff about digging up the research you need and not to brag, but I think our staff here at Snell is pretty exceptional. And really easy to get in touch with! You can meet them at the reference desk on the library’s second floor or you can email, text, and chat with librarians online.

Group projects. Love ’em or hate ’em, they’re a fact of life for many students. The first floor (especially the Cyber Café) is a great place to meet up and divvy up assignments. You can also book a group study room right on the library website.

Finding Books and Articles. Sometimes that obscure book about realist perspective on the development of the dessert banana just isn’t available here on campus. Fortunately, interlibrary loan can help you get the things you need. You can also apply for a Boston Library Consortium card if you want to go raid BU’s bookshelves yourself. But remember, the card takes up to a day to process and it can take a little time for an article to be scanned and uploaded for you from another library. Start thinking about the research you need now so you can bang out that paper come April.

Collecting citations. Creating a bibliography has never been easier. Northeastern provides a subscription to EndNote (ideal for grad students) and Refworks.com (perfect for undergraduates and researchers looking to share sources). Check out this post by Amanda to get started.

Wireless Printing. You’ve burned the midnight oil, your paper is done, and you’re ready to print. Thanks to new software that you can download from myneu.com, you can send documents straight to the library’s printers from your own laptop. This can be especially helpful when you’re printing out a paper five minutes before it’s due. Not that any of us students do that…

Phew! Well, I hope this list helps you out. Take it easy on those late night cups of coffee and stay tuned to Snippets for more hints on how to take advantage of everything our libraries have to offer. Good luck with the rest of your spring semester!

Announcing BioMedCentral Institutional Membership

The Northeastern University Libraries are pleased to announce a new institutional membership in BioMedCentral, effective March 1, 2011. Northeastern joins over 350 institutions worldwide who support BioMedCentral, an online publisher with a pioneering policy of providing free and open access to the peer-reviewed research papers they publish. All research articles published in BioMedCentral’s 213 biomedical and clinical journals are freely and universally accessible online with no barriers to access. And authors keep the copyright to their articles, allowing them to freely reuse and redistribute their research in print and online.

Northeastern’s institutional membership helps sustain this publishing model through direct support of BioMedCentral as well as providing to its affiliated authors a 15% discount on the article processing fee paid upon acceptance of their submitted articles.

As well as securing Open Access to research, publishing in BioMedCentral’s journals brings many additional benefits, including:

• Immediate publication upon acceptance
• No extra charge for extensive datasets, comprehensive methods, color figures, and video footage
• The ability to track how many people have viewed a paper on BioMedCentral’s website
• A large number of journals to choose from, covering all subjects in biology and medicine with different levels of selectivity

For more information about BioMedCentral, visit http://www.biomedcentral.com/.

For more information about Northeastern’s BioMedCentral membership and how it can benefit you, please contact me at h.corbett@neu.edu.