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Open access week events!

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McGill Library’s Open Access Workshops

Read more on our website

Connecting with reliable, open access health information on the Web

Monday, October 22nd ● 10:00 – 11:30 ● Redpath eClassroom

Do you and your family members have questions about health and wellness? Come to this workshop and learn how to:

  • Find reliable and free online consumer health information to answer your health and wellness questions
  • Assess the information and determine if it will be useful to you, your friends and your family
  • Access a collection of  books, available at McGill, written specifically for consumers on health and wellness topics

For more information and to register, visit:
http://apps.library.mcgill.ca/workshops-and-tours/view-by-workshop/319

Open Access Sources: your key to accessing free and reliable research beyond the university gates

Monday, October 29th ● 12:00 -13:30 ● Redpath eClassroom

Are you wondering what will happen after you graduate and you no longer have access to your McGill subscriptions to online research materials? Come to this hands-on workshop and learn how to:

  • Access reliable researchonce you’ve graduated from McGill
  • Find and use a variety of Open Access resources that are available for free online

For more information and to register, visit:
http://apps.library.mcgill.ca/workshops-and-tours/view-by-workshop/320

McGill Library’s Open Access CV Drive

Open your research to the world!

Deposit your scholarly work  in the McGill digital repository, eScholarship, by droping off your CV during the dates and times listed below, or send us a list of links to any websites documenting your scholarship at escholarship.library@mcgill.ca.

CV drop off times:

  • Monday, Oct 22nd, 12:30 – 14:30, FDA lobby
  • Wednesday, Oct 24th, 12:30 – 14:30, FDA lobby
  • Thursday, Oct 25th, 14:00 – 16:00, Leacock lobby

British National Archives

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Looking for British government information? Visit the fantastic National Archives website! Their recently implemented discovery catalogue that retrieves digitized documents alongside records for items in the physical collection. The records are searchable by keyword, but it’s also possible to browse by person, subject, and time period. There are also guides to documents related to a given subject that provide background information and refer readers to other collections as necessary.

The Archives hold documents dating back to the medieval era—fun to see alongside recent history!

Journal acceptance practices in Political Science

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Yoder, Stephen, and Brittany H. Bramlett. 2011. “What Happens at the Journal Office Stays at the Journal Office: Assessing Journal Transparency and Record-Keeping Practices.” PS: Political Science & Politics 44 (2): 363–373. doi:10.1017/S1049096511000217

This article explores the contentious world of journal acceptance rates in political science. The authors surveyed the top 30 journals in the field to investigate the publications’ practices regarding submissions. They give the publications a “transparency score” and also list the acceptance rates and average turn-around times (ranging from 21 days for Foreign Affairs to 120 for World Politics).

Abstract

Dissemination of journal submission data is critical for identifying editorial bias, creating an informed scholarly marketplace, and critically mapping the contours of a discipline’s scholarship. However, our survey and case study investigations indicate that nearly a decade after the Perestroika movement began, political science journals remain reserved in collecting and releasing submission data. We offer several explanations for this lack of transparency and suggest ways that the profession might address this shortcoming.

ICPSR data fair

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ICPSR (Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research) is having an online data fair next week. The resource is relevant to many disciplines, and you can browse the subject classification of the datasets here. Note that it’s necessary to create a free account before downloading some of the data.

The full fair schedule, with session descriptions, is listed here. Here is an outline:

Data Fair Schedule

Monday, October 1

11-11:50 a.m.: General Orientation to ICPSR

12-12:50 p.m.: Navigating the New ICPSR Web site

1-1:50 p.m.: ICPSR in the Classroom

2-2:50 p.m.: Promoting ICPSR on Your Campus

Tuesday, October 2

11-11:50 a.m.: The American National Election Studies: An Introduction

12-12:50 p.m.: The American National Election Study: Finding Hidden Treasure

1-1:50 p.m.: Minority Voting Behavior

2-2:50 p.m.: Latino Voting Behavior and the National Latino Survey

Wednesday, October 3

11-11:50 a.m.: Elections, Polling, and Politics …. Oh, My!

12-12:50 p.m.: SETUPS: The ANES in the Classroom

1-1:50 p.m.: Election Data in the Classroom

World Bank eAtlas of Global Development

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The World Bank recently released a new (free) tool for exploring development data visually and geographically. This video explains more about the eAtlas.

Description:

The World Bank eAtlas of Global Development maps and graphs more than 175 thematically organized indicators for over 200 countries, letting you visualize and compare progress on the most important development challenges facing our world. Most indicators cover several decades, so you can see, for example, how “life expectancy at birth” has improved from 1960 up through the latest year.”

New journal: Human Geography

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The library now subscribes to the journal Human Geography, an independent peer-reviewed journal.

Description of the editorial policy:
The journal covers Human Geography, broadly conceived to cover topics ranging from geopolitics, through cultural and economic issues, to political ecology. We want to produce a well-written, critical, intellectual journal, not full of empirical detail, and not encumbered by too many citations, a journal that can be read in its entirety.

New resource: C.E.E.O.L.

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The library now has access to the Central and Eastern European Online Library (C.E.E.O.L.).

To quote, it is “an online archive which provides access to full text PDF articles from 813 humanities and social science journals and re-digitized documents pertaining to Central, Eastern and South-Eastern European topics.”

The content is also indexed in Google Scholar.

The publications in the database are from the United States, the United Kingdom, and most countries in the region in local languages (as well as some in English).

Searching the web for government information

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Carleton University’s Maps, Data and Government Information Centre has created several customized Google searches that limit results to governmental websites. The areas are:

  • Canada (with results subdivided by federal, provincial, and municipal documents)
  • United States
  • Africa
  • Asia/Pacific
  • Caribbean/Latin America
  • Middle East
  • Intergovernmental Organizations.

Of course, the search tools are limited in effectiveness by the unstructured nature of the web, so the results can be quite mixed in quality. News sources, for example, often come up amongst official publications. With that caveat, though, these engines can be useful for partially narrowing down searches for government information.

Give it a try!

Statista database

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I posted a while back that the library had a trial of the the statistics portal Statista. We now have full access to this resource.

Statista integrates data sets from over 10,000 sources onto a single platform, including:

  • BP
  • U.S. Census Bureau
  • International Monetary Fund Nielsen
  • PricewaterhouseCoopers
  • TNS
  • UN Statistics Division
  • Worldbank

The focus is on financial data, but other topics include health, crime, labour, immigration, and other social indicators.