CiteSeer, techXtra and computer science literature Saturday, 27 May 2006 4:03 pm
Posted by Dongmei in computer science, search engines.2 comments
For those doing computer science (and applied mathematics) research, I'm sure that you use CiteSeer a lot. (CiteSeer is a public digital library and search engine in computer and information science (and related areas) that's hosted at Penn State, currently includes over 700,000 documents).
TechXtra (used to be called EEVLXtra), an initiative of Heriot Watt University cross-search 25 databases in engineering, math, and computing.
In addition to CiteSeer, TechXtra also searches arXiv ePrints, ePrints UK, NASA Technical Reports, CISTI (Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information), EEVL Ejournal Search Engine, Euclid Mathematics and Statistics Journals, and others.
So, when CiteSeer is busy (happens a lot), you can use techXtra as an alternative, however, I do find some discrepancy (tried "vector space model" as an example). And you can't do citation search in techXtra which is a nice feature of CiteSeer.
Doing math (and more) in Google Saturday, 27 May 2006 2:15 pm
Posted by Dongmei in What's new at Google?!, featured IT of the week, search engines.add a comment
When I gave the presentation (see my post on this) to Amy's Math Research Group, I noticed the students don't know much about many functions that Google search provide except keywords search, so decide to blog a bit about these tips, such as:
calculator function: e.g. type "1245^3" (without the quotes) in the search box, you'll get the answer in no time. For more about the calculator function, check out this on Google Help Center, or the complete instruction.
units conversion: Those of us that are familiar with the metric system (SI) would go nuts with the units such as inches, gallons. With Google, it's easy. For example, type "5 inches in cm", you'll get
 |
5 inches = 12.7 centimeters |
in less than 1/2 second.
number search: You can type specific numbers (patent number, FedEx tracking number, etc.) in Google's search box. If you type FedEx tracking number, you'll get the latest info on the package that you're tracking (cool, yeah?).
site search: say you're search something related to CofC but found the college's website search just doesn't work that well, you can add "site:cofc.edu" (without the quotes) after your search terms. You can also use this to do domain search, say add "site:gov" to your search will find only those government sites that related to your topic.
Here's a one-page cheat sheet "Better searches, Better results" that you may find useful.
Also remember, as almost any other search engine, Google has an Advanced Search interface that would serve many of these advanced search features and more (and you don't have to memorize these techniques!).
Shop ebrary, free online access to 20,000+ in-copyright books and more, + many cool features Monday, 3 April 2006 12:19 pm
Posted by Dongmei in Internet Resources, e-books, search engines.add a comment
If you haven't used "Shop ebrary", you may want to try it, it's really great, and it's free (to anyone) to access and read (online) over 20,000 books from major publishers. These are in-copyright books in multiple academic and general interest subject areas, sheet music titles and reports.
A general keyword search on "stem cells" generates 5338 results, a phrase search of "stem cells" (you have to do a proximity search "stem within-1 cells") brings out 1432 titles. That's just an example. If you like travel, there are plenty of travel guidebooks in it. There are also popular titles like "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown, "Light and Liberty: reflections on the pursuit of happiness" by Thomas Jefferson, edited by Eric Petersen, controvertial "A Million Little Pieces" by James Frey, etc. If you love classics, there are plenty of those, like Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables".
Set up is quite easy:
1. Set up an ebrary account (with a minimum of $5.00 to view titles at any time).
2. Get ebrary Reader, the free software that allows browsing, searching, and other advanced features.
3. Search full text and view titles in the ebrary database for free. More details.
4. Create a personal Bookshelf to save your bookmarks, highlights and annotations to view whenever you return to ebrary.
5. Pay only to print pages or copy text for a small fee deducted from funds in your ebrary account (generally 25 cents/page).
Cool features (under "info tools", listed a few here):
- look up new words in an online dictionary;
- find a person (phone, postal, email address, biography);
- find a place (on MapQuest, Yahoo! maps, National Geographic);
- highlight texts in different colors;
- with one click, you can purchase the book on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Gary Price has a review piece about "Shop ebrary", "A (Non-controversial) Alternative to Google Print" on Search Engine Watch; he blogged about this on the Search Engine Watch Blog as well, see "Search and Read Full Text Books Online via ebrary".
Note:
1. It seems not real, but I started this post before I went for the CIL 2006 (Computers in Libraries 2006 Conference) and get caught in other stuff after I came back … I really think people (the general public) should use this service, compared to Google Print (for online book search capabilities) and Amazon's Search Inside the Book, it allows the user to read, annotate, copy and print (for a fee, see above) the full text of books. Compared to other e-book providers(netLibrary, Books24×7, Safari Tech), its interface is clean and very easy to use, and its fully featured search technology is not just cool but powerful.
2. Our library at CofC, just got a subscrption to ebrary. I'll have another post just for that since the paid product does look a little different, and has different functions such as browse capability … …
