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Goin' Mobile with IEEE

IEEE mobile IEEE has just launched their new IEEE Xplore MobileBeta. With this service, anyone can search articles in the IEEE Xplore digital library from any Web-enabled phone. IEEE is looking for opinions on the site and ideas on how to improve it. Go to http://m.ieeexplore.ieee.org to start searching on any internet-enabled mobile device, try the new site, and send feedback via the link at the bottom of the mobile Web page. You can email the article link to yourself for future viewing of the full-text, or read the abstracts right on your phone. Using  the IEEE Xplore® Mobile Beta, you can do a basic search, display the top 10 results by relevancy, and view abstracts and citations. To view the full-text of an article, the user can email the link to any email address and then view the article directly from the main IEEE Xplore Web site when they are on their personal computer.  All Northeastern students, faculty and staff have access to the IEEE Xplore Library. IEEE Xplore Mobile is viewable on all Web-enabled mobile devices. It has been optimized for newer mobile devices (i.e., Apple iPhone, Blackberry Storm). When using older mobile devices (i.e., Blackberry 8360, Blackberry Curve), you may be able to choose “Internet Browser” as your default browser in your device’s options for optimal viewing. Try it out and let IEEE know what you think.

Web of Science!

There’s been some good “viral marketing” going on on campus already, but I thought it was also worth mentioning here — the NU Libraries now offer Web of Science! We’re super-excited to finally have this powerful resource available. For those who may not be familiar with this database, it’s actually a suite of citation indexes from ISI Web of Knowledge. It includes Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index — so it’s not just science, despite the name. The main reason it’s so great is how easy it makes citation searching. Say you’ve found a good article from 1994 and you want to see how many articles after that date list the first article as a reference. Web of Science makes this extremely easy. Just enter the info about the 1994 article — usually author’s name and the journal title will be sufficient — and voila, you’ll get a list of subsequent articles that cite it. Then you can see what publications cite those articles, and so on, tracking a trail of citations up to the present day. Why is this useful? Well, generally speaking, the more a source is cited, the more important it is within its field. Maybe it’s important because it first introduced some major new discovery, or maybe it’s important because it makes a controversial claim that many other people want to debate. Either way, citation searching allows you to quickly see who the major players are in a given field, and how the dialog is continuing. It can be more targeted than regular keyword searching, too, since you can use the citation trail to follow the discussion of a particular topic. I urge all you researchers out there to head on over to the Library website and check out this terrific resource. Enjoy, and let us know what you think, or what tips you have for using it!