This is why it’s important to evaluate websites that we come across. Babson Library has a great handout (PDF) about evaluating websites, but I can tell you that probably the most effective way of determining whether to trust a website is to do a little further research. Go poke around and see if some of the claims being made on the website appear elsewhere. Find a source you trust and look for the information there. For example, I had a momentary loss of confidence about Antarctic languages and decided to reassure myself that, no, they really weren’t real by looking up some of the journal articles the author had referenced. I checked Google Scholar, a free service from Google which indexes millions of academic citations, to see if any citations popped up. Fortunately for my sanity none did. If I had wanted to press the point further, I could have done a search in an encyclopedia or our library’s online databases for “Feorran,” the name of the language.

I did the same with male pregnancy. I thought to myself that male pregnancy, should it happen, would be pretty big news. So I took a look in Yahoo News, a free news search engine. I searched for “male pregnancy” (I placed it in quotes, which tells the search engine to find the exact phrase), and found almost nothing except for an interesting link to a science quiz (Question: To what species in the animal kingdom is the term “male pregnancy” applied? Answer: seahorses and pipefishes–species in which the male carries the young!) and several ads. If I had wanted to push the point further, a search in LexisNexis Academic would have shut the door on the pregnant (human) man for good.

If nothing else, exposing students to convincing, yet fake, websites firmly plants the idea that not everything on the web can be trusted, and that it is the job of the person doing the research to verify his or her sources.

You may have noticed that much of the action in open access publishing is in the STM (science, technology and medicine) areas–this is happening largely because of the crisis in STM publishing that has been going on for most of this decade. A useful article to read on the subject is “ Open Access and the STM Publishing Crisis: A Medical Librarian’s View” by Elizabeth D’Antonio-Gan, which was published in The Charleston Adviser 5(3) p. 56, Jan. 2004 (access limited to SC users). It’s a good snapshot of the problems facing libraries and institutions regarding STM journals, and the pressures which are driving the growth of open access.

One resource I found by reading this article is the Public Library of Science or PLoS, which publishes such open access journals as PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine and PLoS Genetics.

The most interesting journal I found on the site, however, was PLoS One, which describes itself as “A new way of communicating peer-reviewed science and medicine.” PLoS One includes articles from all scientific disciplines (see the list of subjects here), which the editors believe facilitates contact and connection across different fields. It’s also a high-volume publication, and publishes articles essentially as often as they can. There are no set volumes or issues, so research is transmitted as quickly as is possible (PLoS One does have an editorial and peer review process, so journal articles aren’t published instantaneously). For example, I took a look at articles published within the last week, and found 31. A good number of them were published yesterday. Unfortunately, PLoS One and other PLoS journals do seem to charge high publication fees. This is the price of open access–costs are offloaded onto the authors!

Another interesting feature of PLoS One is the ability to annotate and rate articles. Any registered user has the ability to add annotations and to give a rating to any article in the journal. Registration is free and easy–I completed the process in under five minutes. This rating and annotation system is currently in beta–but may expand to other PLoS journals in the future.

The Public Library of Science is trying to create an online academic community around their journals, which is an admirable goal. I’m going to watch this site closely to see what other new and interesting ideas pop up here.

All seven of the PLoS journals are indexed in MEDLINE.

Here are a couple of tips to help you and your students use Google better.

1. Background on Search Engines

It’s good to know something about what a search engine like Google is, and what is does. Search engines on the web basically allow you to search the text of web pages that the search engine has indexed. The search engine finds and indexes pages by using a small program called a “crawler”, “robot” or “spider,” which travels from link to link and archives text from the pages it finds. When you search using Google, this is what you’re searching.

If a web page has no links traveling to it, or requires a password to access, Google won’t find it! This is why a lot of academic information isn’t available through Google–it’s hidden from crawlers behind a password wall.

When you type words into the search box on Google’s front page, Google will look for all of the words you typed in on a certain page. Search engines, like most programs, aren’t necessarily all that smart. They will only give back what you put into them.

There are other search engines out there, and they all do things a little differently, and find different things. Other engines include Yahoo, MSN Live Search, Ask.com and many more.

2. Advanced Search

You’re forgiven for not knowing that an advanced search for Google exists. The link to the advanced search is easy to overlook (see below).

Below, you have more options, such as limiting by when the page was first indexed, the language of the page and the domain. For example, to search only the pages of academic institutions in the United States, type “.edu” in the Domain search box.

At the bottom of the page, you will have the option of switching to more specific Google searches.

3. Know Your Results

Click on the picture below. Can you tell the ads from the “real” links?

Take a look at the order of results: the first isn’t always the best! Google ranks pages based not on whether the page is relevant or recent, but (at least in part) by how many links to that page exist. So what you might see on the first page of a Google search isn’t necessarily the “best” information: only the most popular or the most linked-to. It’s wise to look through several pages of results instead of only the first page.

4. Evaluate What You Find

Google will give you lots of sites to look through, but it won’t tell you which ones have solid information, and which are bogus. You will need to evaluate what you find. To help you do this, check out Babson Library’s Guide to Evaluating Web Resources (PDF). This handy sheet has questions you can ask to determine how valid the information on a page is.

Conclusion

Google (and other search engines) have the potential to be incredibly useful tools for researchers and students. There’s a lot of great information out there on the web–hopefully the above tips will help you to get at it.

Here are a few good places to look for open access journals:

DOAJ.org–the Directory of Open Access Journals
This directory “aims to cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals,” according to its about page. A very good starting place.

BioMedCentral
BioMedCentral, with its sister sites ChemistryCentral and PhysMathCentral, are publishers of open access content in the sciences. Some of the journals hosted here, like BMC Biology, have become more prestigious as of late. All are peer reviewed. ChemistryCentral and PhysMathCentral are just starting up, and will hopefully grow to include more content in the future. Free registration is required.

A note: all of BioMedCentral’s journals are indexed in MEDLINE–and Track it Down! does link to the full text in PubMedCentral.

PubMedCentral
The “the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.” Another great place to go for biomedical and life sciences content. There is some overlap between it and BioMedCentral.

Google Scholar and Scirus
These scholarly search engines can both find open access content. However, Google Scholar won’t indicate for you which results are open access and which require payment. Scirus, to its credit, provides links to BMC and PubMed, among others.

I wanted to share a couple of interesting things I ran across today. I’m doing a little research for a presentation on open access scholarly journals, and I kept running across references to different ways to measure how useful a particular journal actually is.

The best known way to do this seems to be by using ISI’s Journal Citation Report Impact Factors, which measure how often an “average article” in a journal has been cited during the year following its publication, among other things (there’s an interesting explanation by a chemist about how they work here). This has some problems, most notably that a lot of articles don’t get cited until more than a year has passed since their publication.

A free tool that’s trying to remedy some of those problems is EigenFactor, which has a much more complicated way of scoring how valuable a journal is. I don’t pretend to understand it: there’s a lot of math. But some of the basic ideas, such as scoring a journal over five years instead of one, and taking into account the relative weight of each citation, seem to make sense.

The site is worth poking around in, although there are some flaws. The categorization seems a bit strange at times (physical therapy and occupational therapy have no categories, for example, and are lumped in with other disciplines), and the EigenFactors themselves are hard to fathom as pure numbers. Is 0.78 good? It’s hard to tell. But the ranking mechanism is at least somewhat useful, and the information one can obtain by clicking on a particular journal title is interesting.

Bottom line: it’s not always easy to tell whether the journal you’re purchasing or publishing in is “good” or “respected” (whatever that means). But it’s fascinating to see which journals tend to rise to the top of the heap.

Oh, and open access journals, despite differences in publishing format, are seeing comparable impact factors to their non-open access counterparts. I find that the most interesting thing of all.

Edee Edwards, Reference Librarian and Information Literacy Coordinator

RefWorks can be used to foster other literacy standards. For example, when students add citations to their RefWorks account, what they are actually doing is creating a small database of resources. Like any database, students can search through their RefWorks citations by running general keyword searches, but they can also search in specific fields and look for specific subject headings. They can even create their own unique subject headings and search those as well. This database can be managed by creating separate folders for different topics (assignments) and they can be used throughout a student’s career — helping students build their own database library of important resources.

By building their own databases and exploring how database searching works, students can gain a greater understanding of how library databases work. This, in turn, can help improve their ability to search other databases for information. When used in this context, RefWorks supports Information Literacy Standards 2.2 - “Student will be able to describe the organizational structure of library databases, and the difference between a keyword search and a fielded search,” and 2.3 “students will demonstrate an understanding of what a controlled vocabulary is and why it is used.”

Gary Atwood
Reference Librarian