Database News: January 2007
Ebsco Visual Search
This fall, Ebsco added a new visual search interface to its popular indexing and full-text article databases. Visual Search uses technology licensed from Grokker to display search results and their relationships graphically. Using a mouse, users can easily navigate to related, broader, or narrower categories. Since a picture is worth a thousand words:
That's it. Visual Search not only looks cool, it can be a useful tool to help you understand the scope and organization of a subject area.
Can't get enough of visual searching? A number of Internet Search engines offer visual clustering of results. Take a peek at Grokker, KartOO, and Clusty for more eye candy.
Grab It! with RefWorks
RefGrab-It is a new tool from RefWorks that allows you to capture basic bibliographic information about web pages as you view them.
How does RefGrab-It work? First, drag and drop the RefGrab-It "bookmarklet" to your browser toolbar. The client and instructions can be found on the RefWorks web site.
After you have saved RefGrab-It to your browser, you can click on the bookmark when viewing any web page that you wish to capture in RefWorks.
RefWorks will open, if it is not already running, and provide a preview of the data capture for that page:
Click the import button and the record will be imported into your personal RefWorks database.
Note that, in many cases, the information captures includes only page title, URL, and date accessed, as in the example above. Clicking the RefGrab-It tool on a page of, for example, bibliographic citations, would not pull all the citations into your RefWorks file. Instead, you would import only a basic record about the entire page.
RefWorks is a web-based bibliography manager that the University Libraries provide for the entire campus. Once you create your own personal RefWorks account, you can access your database of citations from any computer, anywhere with an Internet connection. You can easily import citations from dozens of different library databases. Your citations can then be exported directly into your paper in dozens of different citation styles. Find out more on our RefWorks page.
Web of Science Citation Report Tool
Web of Science now offers a nifty citation report tool that allows you to analyze the citation patterns for a collection of articles.
How does it work? Search for a topic or author as you normally would. In the example below, we searched for "ivory bill* and woodpecker*." Then, click the "Citation Report" button to the right of the page.
The citation report then shows us the distribution of other publications citing these sources over time as well as ranking the top cited articles on this topic:
Read more about the Citation Report tool on the ISI web site.
Art Museum Image Gallery Additions
Art Museum Image Gallery, the online collection of art images from around the world, has added more than 62,000 new images from many of the most respected museums of Europe, Africa, South America, and Asia: Musée du Louvre, Paris; Museum der Stadt, Vienna; Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; Musée du Château de Versailles; Museo del Prado, Madrid; National Anthropological Museum, Mexico; British Museum; Archaeological Museum, Istanbul; Archaeological Museum, Lima; Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg; Bardo Museum, Tunis; and others.
Acquired through an arrangement with The Art Archive of the Picture Desk, Inc. (a leading art, civilization and history image library), the new images build on Art Museum Image Gallery's coverage of ancient civilizations, American and European history, Medieval history, world religions, and icons from the history of art and architecture. The new content brings the total number of images on Art Museum Image Gallery to more than 155,000, spanning works from 3000 BC to the 20th century.
