Monthly Archives: July 2009

Keeping current with ticTOCs

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Many databases and journal publishers provide RSS feeds and e-mail alerts to notify readers of new articles. However, this often involves creating separate user accounts from the various providers.

The ticTOCs Journal Tables of Contents service is an extremely useful solution to this problem by bringing together information from thousands of journals. Free registration at the site allows you to browse, display, and store tables of contents for more than 12,000 scholarly journals from 439 publishers (at last count). RSS feeds are also supplied for each TOC so that you can receive alerts when new content is published. In most cases, you are linked directly to the full text of articles to which McGill subscribes.

2008 Journal Citation Reports released

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Journal Citation Report for Political Science

Journal Citation Report for Political Science

The Institute of Scientific Information has recently published its annual Journal Citation Reports for 2008. Among other subjects, rankings for journals published in the fields of Political Science and International Relations are available.

The reports are intended to provide an evaluative ranking of scholarly journals based on citation data.

Based on ISI’s formulas, the Political Science journals with the highest impact factor were:

  1. Political Analysis
  2. European Journal of Political Research
  3. American Journal of Political Science

Unsurprisingly, American Political Science Review was cited most frequently overall.

Another ranking system is Eigenfactor, which aims to be “a measure of the overall value provided by all of the articles published in a given journal in a year.” The most recent Eigenfactor ranking for Political Science was completed in 2006. The top three were:

  1. American Political Science Review
  2. American Journal of Political Science
  3. Foreign Affairs

The accuracy and the utility of these rankings has sparked much debate, but the lists are interesting nonetheless.

Easy searching with McGill’s LibX toolbar

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The McGill Library recently launched our own LibX toolbar. The toolbar, which can be installed in Internet Explorer or Firefox, allows you to search for library resources from any web page. LibX can be downloaded from the library’s website.

LibX also gives you visual cues notifying you that content you are looking at might be available through the library.

For example, the McGill crest appears beside books listed on Amazon and other popular websites. Click on the crest to search the library catalogue for the title (a new browser window will open).

McGill crest in Amazon. Click to search library catalogue.

McGill crest in Amazon. Click to search library catalogue.

You can also highlight text on any web page and then right click on your mouse to get a search menu. You can then search the library catalogue or Google Scholar for the highlighted text. This can be very useful, for example, if you find a citation online and want to find out if McGill has the book or journal. You can search for titles, authors, or general keywords.

Right click to search for highlighted text.

Right click to search for highlighted text.

Once you have downloaded the LibX toolbar, be sure to watch the two short tutorial videos.

Happy surfing!

Via McGill Library blog, Howard Ross Library of Management

National Perspectives on Global Leadership project

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CIGI_soundings
The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and the Brookings Institution have launched a new project entitled National Perspectives on Global Leadership (NPGL).

According to the CIGI website, “NPGL is an experimental inquiry into the political relationship between national leaders and their publics. Within this project, experts are exploring the degree to which G20 leaders can rebuild public trust in their capacity to act collectively to restore the world’s economy. Restoration of public faith would have both political and economic impacts: it would raise the confidence levels of consumers, investors and money markets and, by extension, contribute to global economic stability and growth.”

One major product of the NPGL’s work is the Soundings Series, which consists of analysis of the political relationship between national leaders and their publics in the context of the London G20 Summit of April 2009. The series thus far includes papers discussing 12 of the G20 countries, as described in this introduction.

CIGI also produces a working papers, technical papers, reports, and books. The library holds most of the books, and I will be glad to take requests for any that we lack.

Eduroam: wireless connections when you travel

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McGill University is a member of Eduroam, an authentication service allowing users (researchers, teachers, students, staff) from participating educational institutions to securely access the wireless network of any Eduroam-enabled institution by using the same credentials they would use at their home institution.

For McGill users, this means that if you are traveling to any of the institutions participating in Eduroam, your McGill username and password will give you wireless internet access on those campuses. You can then configure the McGill Virtual Private Network (VPN) to remotely access McGill library resources.

You can access the Eduroam network at any participating member site (including most satellite campuses that provide wireless access) in the following regions:
Canada
Europe
Australia
Asia Pacific

Further details can be found in McGill’s IT Knowledge Base.

OECD Factbook explorer

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oecd_factbook

As Michael Blastland of BBC News Magazine describes it, this is statistical eye candy. The OECD Factbook eXplorer is a tool for visualizing OECD data, allowing users to examine statistical patterns across time and space. The site makes it easy to generate animated scatterplots and static graphs by selecting geographic regions, time periods, and demographic and economic indicators.

Blastland’s video report further illustrates the tool’s capabilities.

Thanks to Rex Brynen for alerting me to this resource.

Lexis-Nexis tutorial

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Lexis-Nexis is an essential database for searching news and legal information. Some may remember that the library used to have access only via computers in the library, but last year we moved to a web-based interface that is accessible from any computer on campus or connected to the McGill VPN (no password required).

The database currently indexes more than 40,000 legal, news and business sources. Consult the source list for details.

Lexis-Nexis also offers a great video tutorials with tips for more efficient searching.