Try BrowZine!

Have you yet tried your hand at "BrowZine"?!   No need to knit your brow over efforts to stay current with your favorite research journals.  Download the Browzine app for iPad or Android tablet. 

When you download the BrowZine application from the AppStore or Google Play, you will see a list of schools.  Select UW-Madison then enter your NetID and password.  Once installed, you can create a bookshelf of your favorite journals, browse and read articles, and export citation records to compatible citation management tools. 

Brought to you by UW-Madison Libraries, BrowZine is available to all UW-Madison faculty, staff and students. 

Staying Current

How do you stay current with the literature in your field of study or research?  If you find this a challenging prospect, our librarians have the tools to help.

Staying up-to-date with what is happening in your area of research may take several forms.  Are you interested in having browsing access to the most current volume of a favorite journal or magazine?  Or, would you prefer to receive an email message or RSS feed to newly-published research on a topic of interest?  In similar fashion, would you like to know when your published article is cited by other researchers?  Or, do your enjoy reading blogs and current news from News sites and the popular press?

If any and all of these apply to the information you would like to retrieve and your workflow (more on that question of management, below), note that there are open Web resources and library-licensed tools that can serve this process of keeping current.  A selection of these tools and assists are listed, below, by approach or form.

Table of Contents (your favorite or essential journals)

• Browzine (see our previous post)
• Journal TOCs (free, scholarly journal TOCs)
• Database Alerts (via email or RSS)
• Publisher Websites (some offer free TOCs)

Search and Citation Alerts (your area of research interest or by publication)

• Database Alerts (via email or RSS)
• Google Scholar Alerts (via email with Google Account--either to "My Citations" or to a topic search)
• Google Book Alerts (an option as from the Result Type menu)

Blogs, News Media, Website Updates

• Subscribe to feeds using feed readers or Web browser.

Library Guides, Liaisons and Workshops
You do not need to do this alone.  Speak to your librarians for assistance and customization.  Attend a drop-in workshop or do-it-yourself by reading our Web guides.

• Research Guide to Keeping Current in the Literature
• MyUW, Research Tab (Create a customized, browsing access list of your "Favorite Library E-Resources")

Managing the Information you Retrieve
Campus Libraries provide support for several software products for managing your citations and formatting your reference list.  Evaluate these tools and attend a drop-in workshop to explore their features.  The beauty of these tools is that they can communicate well with library-licensed databases making it relatively easy and efficient to move records from database to manager. 

Have any tips and resources to share?  If so, please reply to this post.

BrowZine

Would you like to follow your favorite research journals using your iPad or Android tablet?  If so, try the BrowZine App today!  When you download the BrowZine application from the App Store or Google Play, you will see a list of schools.  Select UW-Madison then enter your NetID and password.  Once installed, you can create a bookshelf of your favorite journals, browse and read articles, and export citation records to compatible citation management tools. 

While not every journal to which UW-Madison Libraries has access will be available, BrowZine does maintain a relationship with many academic publishers (see the list here).  

Brought to you by UW-Madison Libraries, BrowZine is available to all UW-Madison faculty, staff and students.  Enjoy!

Get Acquainted; Plan an Orientation

Are you new to campus or do you have new staff or incoming graduate students? If so, you may wish to consult with your Steenbock library liaison to plan an orientation to library collections and services.

Steenbock librarians are happy to meet with new staff and students--be it for an individual consultation, small-group workshop, or as participant in a department welcome event. Complete a request form.

Additionally, library liaisons can provide the following services:

• Assist with library services and policies (e.g., Interlibrary Loan, UW System search and retrieval…etc.),
• Assist with customizing email alerts to keep you informed about new articles matching your topic criteria or with tables of contents to your favorite journals,
• Provide in-depth reference consultations--at our office or yours--(e.g., help with strategy and database choices, work with your citation management product…etc.),
• Supply customized instructional sessions and course Web pages for your students,
• Consult on questions related to publishing your research (e.g., identify target journals, manage copyright, measure research impact, or investigate open-access publishing options).

Watch for our Steenbock Drop-In Workshops and Tours | August/September Tours

Or see the campus-wide libraries’ Workshops/Classes/Tours calendar.

Graduate Support Series, Spring 2011

UW-Madison campus libraries have teamed to offer a series of free workshops for graduate students. As each workshop is designed to be a "stand-alone" presentation, students can choose to attend any number of them, in any combination.

Please visit the workshop site or view the flyer (PDF) for the listing of workshops in the series. From "Keeping Current with the Literature" to "Using Patents and Technical Reports"--there is something for you.

Do note date, time and library location. Registration is recommended; register with the GSC (Graduate Student Collaborative).

Google Scholar Alerts

For those who enjoy Google Scholar, do note that it now enables you to set an alert--that is, to save a particular search strategy on a topic, specific article, or author and have Google send you an email notification when more articles are added to its database that match your criteria.

It’s as simple as running your search, then clicking the envelope icon "create email alert". If you are interested in "cited by" information for a particular article, run the search for that article, click "Cited by" beneath the search result, then click the envelope icon "create email alert".

• See the Help pages for more information.

Additionally, consider setting your Scholar Preferences to include a link to Find It at UW-Madison and a link to export your records to a preferred Citation Manager (EndNote, RefWorks, etc.) The Find It at UW Madison link will map you to local holdings for particular articles--either in full-text online or as available in print from campus libraries. (When using Google Scholar on-campus, you should see this Find It at UW-Madison link).

If you are using Google Scholar from off-campus, select Scholar Preferences from the Google Scholar search page, and search for the name of your library in the Library Links section (for example, enter UW Madison).

Select boxes for your campus library system and the Open WorldCat Library Search.

Select your preferred Bibliography Manager from the drop menu near the bottom of the Preferences page. Once selected, links will appear with your retrieval to enable you to export citations to that manager.

Click to Save Preferences.

(Do note that selecting a link to a full-text article from off-campus will require you to login with your UW-Madison NetId).

Liaison Services

Have you met your liaison? Summer session can be a good time to get acquainted. Steenbock liaisons serve as principal contacts for each department and program the library supports.

Library liaisons can provide the following services:

• Provide in-depth orientation for new faculty, staff, graduate students, and project and research assistants.

• Assist with library services and policies (e.g., Library Express, faculty runner cards, UW System search and retrieval…),

• Customize email alerts to keep you informed about new articles matching your topic criteria and tables of contents of your favorite journals,

• Provide in-depth reference consultations—at our office or yours--(e.g., help with strategy and database choices, customize your own alerts…),

• Supply customized instructional sessions and course web pages for your students,

• Consult on questions related to publishing your research (e.g., identifying target journals, managing copyright, measuring research impact, open access publishing),

Find liaisons by Department/Program/Center

Find liaisons by Name

Keeping Current

Make those library databases work for you! Many of the databases to the research literature permit you to save a search that will pull citations, either weekly or monthly (you choose), and email you that retrieval—provided there is new content that matches your saved search. These alerts are easy to set up and are especially useful for ongoing research where you will want to keep track of a particular topic over time.

For more information about email alerts (and RSS feed options), see the Libraries’ Alerts and RSS page. Steenbock librarians are also happy to assist you with selecting a database and constructing the search.

Keeping Current, Workshop 2/27

Do you feel overwhelmed by the challenge of keeping up with the literature in your field of study or research? This workshop will share several tools that can help you save time and maximize your efficiency for staying up-to-date with that information.

Learn how to create a custom list of library databases or have table of contents of the most recent journals sent directly to your email.
Be alerted to the most recent articles on a topic.
Monitor Websites, blogs and other important resources with ease.
Keep track of citations and make bibliographies quickly.

The workshop is structured to allow plenty of time for hands-on exploration of resources.

Keeping Current with the Literature
Wednesday February 27 (12:30 - 2:00 PM)
Steenbock Library, Room 105

Scitopia.org

Search portal Scitopia.org, was created with the collaboration of 15 professional science & technology societies to search the contents of the digital libraries of the participating societies, government documents from the DOE Information Bridge and patents from the USPTO and European and Japanese patent databases.

Simple and advanced search options are supplied with the advanced search enabling limits by date and by publisher/society. Retrieval sorts records by society, patents and government documents (as indicated by tabs).

In some instances, particularly to government documents, full-text may be available. While purchasing options are supplied to content retrieved using Scitopia.org, campus libraries often enjoy subscription access to society journals or may already have the document in their collections. Do consult Find It for locating journal articles or MadCat for documents and conference proceedings. If you need assistance, contact a Steenbock librarian.

For publications that campus libraries do not have access, place a request with Library Express.

Many of the Scitopia.org partners also supply free email alerts and RSS feeds to news and newly-published journal articles.

RSS Journal Feeds (Ebling Library)

Do you use RSS to keep current with the literature in your field of research or study? If so, you may find the journal feeds collected and organized by library staff at Ebling Library to be particularly useful for that purpose. The list of journal feeds ranging from such disciplines as allergy and immunology to genetics and genomics to nutrition and dietetics to virology can be browsed by these subject areas or alphabetically by journal title. Subscribing to each journal feed will furnish a “table of contents” to the most recent edition of that particular journal. A selection of feeds is also supplied to news sources for general health, medicine, NIH research and pharmacy.

There are a variety of feed-readers available for your use including Bloglines or Google Reader, among others. The Ebling journal feed site includes general information about RSS and feed-readers. Additional information about feed-readers can also be found at the campus Libraries’ Alerts and RSS Feeds page.

UW Digital Collections, Lesson Plans and RSS Feed

How might you use UW Digital Collections in your teaching and learning?

Not only do the digital collections grant you access to primary literature and imagery in many topics and disciplines, the collections staff invites you to browse sample lesson plans or to submit your own. Once reviewed and accepted, the lesson plans utilizing UW Digital Collections content will be entered into the ide@s database where other Wisconsin educators can access them.

Keep up-to-date on new collections and news from UW Digital Collections by subscribing to its RSS feed.

Keeping Current using RSS Feed-Readers (or News Aggregators)

RSS or "Really Simple Syndication," is an XML format for sharing syndicated information—generally, frequently-changing information—on the Web. RSS enables you to monitor Websites for new information without needing to visit each site or database.

Some RSS readers are freely-available to Web users; these include Bloglines or My Yahoo.

Many news sites and publication Websites supply RSS feeds of new/current information and/or research. Using a feed-reader enables you to view all of these feeds of news and research information in one place. Within a feed-reader, the feed will show a short description with a link to the full content.

Subscribe to a feed by entering the feed's link (URL in browser address bar) into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon to initiate a subscription process.

A subscription maps a feed to the user’s reader. Look for feed links on a feed service page or from a site’s main/home page or look for icons on the page or from within the browser’s URL address bar.

While feeds are commonly found at many news sites (BBC, CNN, Guardian, among many others), feeds are also available from the following research news sites:

Biology News Net

EurekAlert

PLOS (Public Library of Science)

Using the Bloglines Feed-Reader

Visit: http://www.bloglines.com/

Create an account: http://www.bloglines.com/register/

The Bloglines login is your email address; the password you create must be six characters in length (and ideally, not easily guessed).

Once you are logged in, you will be able to subscribe to feeds and to organize them into folders or categories of feed information.

For additional information about RSS readers, see:

http://www.library.wisc.edu/alerts/more-about-rss.html