Creating Alerts from the Web of Science

Alerts are a comfortable way to keep you up-to-date about new papers regarding your area of research or who cites your work. Alerts are available in several databases like Web of Science and SciFinder (Keep me posted).

How to set up alerts and RSS feeds in Web of Science (WoS)?

1. Search Alert

  • Search alerts will notify you of new items added to the database that match your search query.
  • Save searches to run them again later or set up a citation alert by clicking the Save History / Create Alert button on the Search History page. In the next step you will be asked to save your history to your private account. To set up the search alert select the check box Send Me E-mail Alerts.

2. Citation Alert

  • You will be notified when a specific article is cited by any new article indexed in the WoS.
  • Each WoS record has a Create Citation Alert button. Just confirm to add the citation alert to your personal account.

3. RSS Feed

  • You can manage your alerts from any Web of Knowledge page. Click My Citation Alerts or My Saved Searches in the personalization tab (at the top of the page).
  • Set up a RSS feed to track new results that match your search terms by clicking the orange XML button in the RSS Feed column. Subscribe to your feed with your preferred reader or copy and paste the URL in your RSS reader subscriptions.

If you do not have a Web of Knowledge personal account you can easily create a new profile by using the Sign In button in the personalization tab (at the top of the page).

Web of Science training material is available at Thomson Reuters webpage.

SciFinder Online Workshop Week in January 2012

The Scientific Information Retrieval Services for the Biology & Medicine Section of the Max Planck Society will offer a new series of online workshops in January.

The workshops include:

  • SciFinder Workshop Week (16th – 20th January)
  • Scientific Information Resources of the MPG (in English & in German)
  • Introduction to the Web of Knowledge (WoS)
  • Literaturverwaltungssysteme – Einführung & Überblick (in German)
  • Literaturverwaltung mit EndNote (in German)

Attendance is free of charge for staff and guests of the Max Planck Society, but online registration is required. Workshops usually last 90 minutes.

Find more details on schedule, technical requirements and registration at
http://www.biochem.mpg.de/en/facilities/ivs/SupportTraining/Workshop/Schedule/index.html

An additional poster/flyer (pdf) regarding the SciFinder Workshop Week is also available:
http://www.biochem.mpg.de/en/facilities/ivs/Dokumente/Flyer_SciFinder.pdf

Author identifiers

Unique identifiers for scholarly authors can be useful, e.g. for linking to an individual’s research output.

But author identifiers are not widely used, perhaps because they are not so easy to implement. Here are three popular systems that are integrated in e-print archives / bibliographic databases:

  • ArXiv Author ID
  • Researcher ID (Web of Science)
  • Scopus Author ID

The systems aim to identify all publications of an author indexed in the related database and some are linked with profile information about the authors. Therefor name variants or name changes of a particular person has to be included. Another problem to solve is to distinguish different people with the same name. Mostly this works not sufficient because intellectual reviewing and user feedback is needed. While Scopus AuthorID relies on external claims, ResearcherID allows only authors to register for an ID number and to create their own publication list.

Be careful by using the author identifiers for databases searches. Experience has shown that you usually will not get a complete and correct publication list.

Last but not least a hint to the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) must not be missed here. ORCID is a non-profit organization which aims to establish a registry for author identificaton as the de facto standard. “The Open Researcher and Contributor ID would be an alphanumeric string that uniquely identifies an individual scientist in much the same way that a Digital Object Identifier uniquely identifies a paper, book or other scholarly publication.” (Nature, 462, 825 (17 December 2009) doi:10.1038/462825a [only for subscribers])

References:
Fenner, Martin (2011): Author Identifier Overview. In: LIBREAS.Library Ideas, Jg. 7, H. 1 (18). http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/docviews/abstract.php?lang=&id=37867
ArXiv Author ID. http://arxiv.org/help/author_identifiers
Researcher ID. http://www.researcherid.com
Scopus Author ID. http://help.scopus.com/robo/projects/schelp/h_autsrch_intro.htm
ORCID. http://orcid.org/

Web of Science Version 5

Have you noticed some changes in the new Web of Science version 5? Not only the layout was updated there are new features available. So what’s new?

Search features

  • automatic searches for alternative forms of your search term such as spelling variations and name variants – lemmatization can be turned on and off
  • there are no stop words in the topic field
  • the new introduced NEAR operator lets you specify the distance between your search terms
  • new search fields: DOI (Digital Object Identifier), ResearcherID
  • search full words in the address field (e.g. University)
  • search author name as published (for records from 2007 onwards)
  • left hand truncation will be allowed with the October WoS release

Citation counts

  • the Web of Science citation count as well as the overall Web of Knowledge citation count is displayed, so article citation counts include cites from three sources: Web of Science, Biosis Citation Index, Chinese Science Citation Database – we have a subscription for Web of Science, so only these links to citing articles can be viewed

Managing results

  • no record viewing limit anymore
  • abstract preview on the results page
  • analyze more than 100,000 results by different criteria
  • marked list: combined list across different databases

Web of Science website: “Would you like to see how each feature works?

Online Workshops for staff and guests of the Max Planck Society

The IVS-BM interactive workshops focus on helping you to select and efficiently use the most appropriate scientific information resources for your research. Both licensed and publicly available databases or tools relevant to many areas of science will be presented and discussed in detail. Make sure that you take advantage of the full range of high quality information resources and services available to you in the MPG!

Online Workshops offered in September and October 2011 include:

  • Text Searching with SciFinder
  • Bibliographic Management Systems – Introduction & Overview
  • Bibliographic Management with EndNote
  • Introduction to the Web of Knowledge (WoS)

Attendance is free of charge, but registration is required. Workshops usually last 90 minutes and are held in English (on request, also in German). The current workshop schedule, content details and online registration forms are available at: http://www.biochem.mpg.de/en/facilities/ivs/SupportTraining/Workshop/Schedule/index.html