IS News Blog

Mid semester week and Easter weekend opening hours for Stirling campus are now available on the IS website. See full opening hours page.  Click here for Highland campus opening hours.

Monday 6 April – Monday 13 April 2009 Inc.

Normal Semester Hours resume Tuesday 14 April 2009

Additional useful metrics have been added to Journal Citation Reports in their recent update. (Reminder of what the Journal Citation Reports are).

 

New metrics added:

 

• 5 year Impact Factor: considered a better measure for journals in slower moving areas (traditional Impact Factors are based on 2 years of data).

 

• Summary Rank in Category: displays journal ranking across multiple subject categories.  Showing ranking across categories provides a broader context to the Impact Factors.

 

• Box Plots displays by Category: displays box plots of impact factors for each subject category a journal appears in – this graphically shows the dispersion of impacts.

 

• Integration of Eigen Factor Score and Article Influence: rather than just considering all journals that cite articles to be of equal weight, these measures give more weight if citations are made by more “influential” journals. 

 

• Analyses of Journal Self Cites: displays the contribution of journal self cites to impact factor calculations – this helps identify journals with a narrow focus.  Tables show how many of a journal’s cites are self cites and the percent that contribute to the Impact Factor calculation.

 

 

Many of these metrics can seem rather complicated until you see some examples: the 9 minute narrated training session created by Thomson Reuters is very helpful, see: https://www.brainshark.com/brainshark/vu/view.asp?pi=737242501

 

 

To access the Journal Citation Reports, logon to the University Portal, and select Journal Citation Reports from the “A-Z list of online resources”, then from the Web of Knowledge gateway choose the “Select a Database” tab. 

 

 

Clare Allan

Subject Librarian

The Landmap service has acquired additional data which is free for UK HEIs to use. The new data is Colour Infra-Red Aerial Photograp of the UK and a 5m Digital Terrain Model of Egland and Wales. For further information about Landmap see http://landmap.mimas.ac.uk/landmap/index.php/Table/Datasets/ and for their learning materials see http://landmap.mimas.ac.uk/landmap/index.php/Table/Learning-Materials/. 

 

Landmap are hosting a workshop Heights and Flights on 24 February 2008, in Manchester that academic colleagues may be interested in. See http://landmap.mimas.ac.uk/landmap/index.php/Future-Events/Heights-and-Flights-Workshop.html for full details.

Lisa Haddow
Senior Subject Librarian

***POLL NOW FINISHED***
StirGate is a new way of searching for journal articles, web sites and other useful publications, and we’d like to know what you think of it.  

 

Let us know by clicking on the Quick Poll on the Information Services home page.

 

Far more important than X Factor, Celebrity Big Brother, Your Country Needs You, Strictly and Ice Dancing – we need your votes!

 

You probably didn’t get to vote for Obama – and now have an itchy feeling that you want to register your voice for something – this is your chance!!

 

Currently we only have access to StirGate for this academic session – but if you find it helpful then we’ll try find a way to keep it.

 

 

Don’t know what StirGate is? – see What is StirGate

 

 

Clare Allan

Subject Librarian