Library News Spring 2002

Food for Thought ... Except in the Library

You may have noticed a few new warning signs around the library. Lately, we have felt the need to remind our patrons of what are essentially universal truths where the library is concerned.

The library is the hub of the research community. To be a good library, that facility should be user-friendly. We make every effort to help our patrons in the use of our materials and equipment. However, there are two elements of student life that are the bane of our existence: FOOD and BEVERAGES. We appreciate that you are trying to save time by nourishing your body while you nourish your mind, but the risks are too high.

In the course of touring the library to pick up used materials, we have discovered a wide array of contraband: apple cores, orange and banana peels, chip and cookie wrappers of every variety, and even the remains of someone’s dinner. These things attract the kind of pests that do irreparable damage to library materials. Rats, mice, and roaches love books and journals. They are not avid readers, but connoisseurs of the printed page. And if there is a smudge from a greasy thumb, it’s all the more tasty. They will also eat through computer wires.

Beverage containers also abound. Unopened, they are not a problem. But an open container is an invitation to disaster! Even an accidental spill of water can ruin an expensive journal or irreplaceable book or damage computer keyboards. And drinks with sugar not only ruin books and journals but also attract ants. Ants won’t do as much damage to books as rats but it is hard to study when they are crawling up your legs!

We sympathize with you that you don’t have a student union in which to relax and socialize but your cooperation in this is essential to ensure the availability of the collection for future patrons. Therefore, please help us protect our collection of materials and provide a clean, quiet, pest-free environment in which to use those materials.

--Valerie Hernandez

Web of Science & Other ISI Databases

The LSUHSC Libraries now subscribe to 3 databases produced by the Institute for Scientific Information. Web of Science (WOS), Current Contents Connect (CCC), and Journal Citation Reports (JCR) are exciting additions to our collection of databases and search services. The subscription to WOS includes Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, limited to articles published since 1997.

The strength of WOS is cited reference searching. The record for each article in the database includes the list of references cited in that article as well as more recent articles that cite the original paper. With WOS, you can find out who has cited your own articles or find later works related to a known article. It allows you to trace the history of a concept, finding both earlier and more current articles.

In WOS, topics are searched with keywords supplied by authors and indexers, not by controlled vocabulary. Therefore, it is important to "OR" together synonyms and to use the truncation symbol (*) liberally in order to pick up various forms of a word, such as plurals and British spellings. For example, colo*r* will retrieve articles with color, colour, colours, colors, or coloring.

Clicking on the "Related Records" link at the top of an entry pulls up articles that share at least one cited reference. If an article record has a link to CCC, you can go directly to the table of contents for that issue to find other articles that may be on the same topic. You also can click on the JCR button to view the impact factor of the journal. Some records also have links to full-text, when available via the LSUHSC libraries.

JCR provides data for determining the importance of journals according to how often they are cited in the literature. This multidisciplinary database covers over 5,000 science journals and 1,700 social science journals, searchable by discipline or by journal title. Examples of the information that JCR provides are the journal impact factor, which measures how frequently the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year; a list of journal rankings in a field; and the total number of citations from a journal in a year. For example, in the field of dentistry, oral surgery, and medicine for 2000, Journal of Dental Research ranks #1, with 7,980 total cites and an impact factor of 4.438.

Web of Science provides a different approach to the literature than MEDLINE and is a valuable complement to searching in Ovid or PubMed. Although WOS is easy to use, the dental librarians will be happy to demonstrate how to use the system or to answer any questions about the ISI online products.

--Elizabeth Strother

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