Slide deck presentation from a session at WebSearch University 2014 on Great Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine resources. Emphasis is on primarily open access resources.

1. GREAT SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY,
ENGINEERING AND MEDICINE WEB
RESOURCES: A WHIRLWIND TOUR
Matthew Von Hendy MA/MLS
Green Heron Information Services

2. WELCOME!
 Owner—Green Heron
Information Services
 Professional
Librarian—National
Academies of Science,
EPA, NASA
 Birder, cyclist, runner—
recent Alaskan
adventurer

3. SESSION GOALS
 Discuss important science, technology, engineering
and medicine web based tools
 Touch on different information genres in this area
(search, patents, data etc.)
 Provide quick overviews and search tips for
resources
 Take a brief look at trends that are driving change in
health and science information sources
 Questions and answers

4. A FEW CONSIDERATIONS
 Content will vary—everyone’s top STEM resources
will be different
 Excellent health and science subscription
information resources---
 Focus on this session will primarily be open access
resources
 Aimed at intermediate level researchers

5. THE WHIRLWIND TOUR STARTS NOW..

6. DIVING IN:
BEST SOURCES FOR GETTING STARTED

7. SCIENCE DAILY
HTTP://WWW.SCIENCEDAILY.COM/
 For sciences and health sciences keeping with
research and news is a huge challenge
 Excellent resource—breakdown by headlines,
topics, (take a look at ‘quirky’), updated often
 For health sciences, many subscription resources,
New England Journal of Medicine (NJEM), Lancet
 Alternate: EurekAlert http://www.eurekalert.org/

8. SCIENCE SEARCH TOOLS
 The Mediocre, the Bad and the Ugly
(apologies to Clint Eastwood)

9. WORLDWIDESCIENCE.ORG
HTTP://WORLDWIDESCIENCE.ORG/
 State of science search—pretty sad—example of
some of the best of existing tools (‘the mediocre’)
 Serves as gateway for accessing international
science agency websites and resources
 Also has topical/keyword searching—decent
results, clunky interface
 Other government related science search tools:
SciTech Connect http://www.osti.gov/scitech
Science Gov http://www.science.gov/scigov/

10. OPENAIRE
HTTPS://WWW.OPENAIRE.EU/SEARCH/FIND-PUBLICATIONS-DATA-
PROJECTS
 Effort to increase European scientific open access
content
 Search includes publications, data & datasets,
some grey literature—mostly open access sources
 Quality of search results varies
 Another European resource to watch: JURN
(http://www.jurn.org/) – originally humanities focus
but rapidly increasing science and health science
content

11. DATA & DATASETS

12. DRYAD
HTTP://DATADRYAD.ORG/
 Major repository service for data and datasets
including items found in some peer-reviewed
journals
 Contents free to download, allow searching both by
keyword and DOI (digital object identifiers)
 Another excellent source:
Databib http://databib.org/

13. PATENTS

14. PATENTS– PART ART, PART SCIENCE
 Critical importance to entrepreneurs and
businesses working in the medical, scientific and
technical arenas
 Excellent tools for researchers to look at….
 But complexity, diversity of tools and legal
implications--searching part art, part science—
perhaps leave it to experts

15. ESPACENET
HTTP://WWW.EPO.ORG/SEARCHING/FREE/ESPACENET.HTM
L
 Great user-friendly resource from the European
Patent Office
 Covers over 80 million international patent records
dating back to 1836
 International coverage is good except for United
States Patent and Trademark (USPTO) records
 Look at ‘About Searching in Escapenet’ before
starting--

16. WIPO PATENTSCOPE
HTTP://PATENTSCOPE.WIPO.INT/SEARCH/EN/SEARCH.JSF
 Excellent resource from the World Intellectual
Property Organization (WIPO)
 Offers coverage of some international patent offices
not found in other resources
 Coverage is spotty and not comprehensive for all
countries
 Many search options including simple data
visualizations (charts and graphs)

17. MEASURING AND OTHER PROPERTY TOOLS

18. PHYSICAL REFERENCE DATA (NIST)
HTTP://WWW.NIST.GOV/PML/DATA/
 Many excellent authoritative on-line resources for
lists of scientific measurement and other properties
 One stop for official measurement maintained by
the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) Physical Measurement Laboratory – online
data organized by element

19. RCSB PROTEIN DATABANK
HTTP://WWW.RCSB.ORG/PDB/HOME/HOME.DO
 An information portal to biological macromolecular
structures—covering more than 100,000 items
 Searching options include PDB ID, molecule name
and author name, organism, experiment method
and x-ray resolution
 Search results can also be used to visualize and
analysis molecules
 Maintained by Rutgers and UCSD (University of
California-San Diego) with government funding

20. SPRINGER PROTOCOLS
HTTP://WWW.SPRINGERPROTOCOLS.COM/
 Online database of reproducible laboratory
protocols in the biomedical and life sciences
 Primarily a subscription based service (i.e. you pay)
but some free protocols are offered
 Well respected resource in this area

21. SUBJECT SPECIFIC RESOURCES

22. TECHXTRA
HTTP://WWW.TECHXTRA.AC.UK/INDEX.HTML
 Robust information portal from UK concentrating on
engineering, mathematics and engineering
 Decent search capability covering wide range of
resources (primarily open access) including journal
and grey literature resources
 Worth exploring a search tool if you are interested
only in these areas; use advanced search

23. SKYBRARY
HTTP://WWW.SKYBRARY.AERO/INDEX.PHP/MAIN_PAGE
 Electronic repository of safety knowledge related to
aircraft operation and aviation safety
 Wiki-style format with extensive quality control
measures in place to maintain information quality
 Listing of accidents/incidents, aircraft types, airport
directory

25. ETDE WORLD ENERGY BASE
HTTPS://WWW.ETDE.ORG/ETDEWEB/BASICSEARCH.JSP?PG=2
 International collaboration effort between energy
agencies and IEA—
 Excellent place to search for international energy
related grey literature and citations
 Transitioning to worldwideenergy.org
 Worldwideenergy.org beta phase—promises to
offer additional searching capabilities

26. MINDAT
HTTP://WWW.MINDAT.ORG/
 Largest and most visited mineralogy website
 Clunky looking interface but packed with
information and resources
 Search options include mineral, rock or gem name,
location, keyword and photo, mineral structure
 Discussion boards, mineralogy news

27. REVISITING OLD FAVORITES

28. ARXIV.ORG
HTTP://ARXIV.ORG/
 Maintained by Cornell University – one of the
longest operating e-prints services
 Provides open access and searching to almost one
million e-prints in the areas of physics,
mathematics, computer science, quantitative
biology and quantitative finance and statistics
 E-prints mainly of journal articles and conference
papers—although some other grey literature
sources

29. PUBMED-NCBI
HTTP://WWW.NCBI.NLM.NIH.GOV/PUBMED
 Well-known excellent open access biomedical
resource—maintained by the US National Library of
Medicine
 Complex tool—many people don’t realize it’s full
searching capability or make use of tools
 MeSH database or Protein Cluster, Single Citation
Matcher
 NCBI—allows you to create personal account,
search & save results –can be used anywhere
there is an Internet connection

30. ASTROPHYSICS DATA SYSTEM
HTTP://ADSWWW.HARVARD.EDU/
 Major resource in area of astronomy, astrophysics
and physics–
 Includes 3 major bibliographic databases including
ArXiv.org containing almost 11 million records

31. WHAT ABOUT SCITECH GREY LITERATURE?

32. NY ACADEMY OF MEDICINE GREY LITERATURE REPORT
HTTP://WWW.GREYLIT.ORG/
 Grey literature critical component of health sciences
(included as part of systematic reviews) and
scientific research
 Can be hard to find and not often indexed
 NY Academy of Medicine GreyLit Report—well
known and respected in public health arena
 See ‘50 Shades of Scientific and Technical Grey
Literature’ - http://bit.ly/1kM7e3a

33. MISCELLANEOUS

34. THE GEOSCIENCES: SELECTED WEB RESOURCES
HTTP://WWW.ISTL.ORG/11-SPRING/INTERNET.HTML
 Scientific concepts and technical terms can be hard
for non-scientists to understand and vary by field
 Excellent guides have been created—great way for
researchers to ‘get up to speed’
 Representative example developed by Linda
Zellmer at Western Illinois University

35. GLOBAL VOLCANISM PROGRAM
HTTP://WWW.VOLCANO.SI.EDU/
 Portal for volcano information maintained by the
Smithsonian Institution and recognized for its
excellence
 Resources include a volcano database, activity log
and photo galleries

36. DEFENSE TECHNICAL INFORMATION CENTER (DTIC)
HTTP://WWW.DTIC.MIL/DTIC/
 Some scientific and technical information can be
found in places that researchers tend to overlook
 Department of Defense (DOD) funds a lot of
science-related work from nanotechnology to
human performance
 DTIC gathers the publicly available DOD sponsored
research–
 Search tip: start by looking at “Search Technical
Reports”

37. FUTURE

38. JOVE
HTTP://WWW.JOVE.COM/
 What might the future of science information and
resources look like?
 JOVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments)– first
peer-reviewed scientific video journal—published
since 2006
 Subscription resource—covers wide range of
biology, chemistry and environmental sciences

39. SMART FOAM (APP)
HTTP://WWW.ICLINICALAPPS.COM/#!SMARTFOAM/C1QYD
 Just one example of efforts to incorporate high
quality scientific research in mobile format
 Aims to collate free online medical information for
everyone---how good is the information?
 Scientific information will be moving from mobile to
other forms (wearables?) sooner than we can
guess

40. CHAIN REDS
HTTPS://WWW.CHAIN-PROJECT.EU/
 Co-ordination & Harmonisation of Advanced e-
Infrastructures for Research and Education Data
Sharing
 Effort sponsored by the European Commission to
build scientific information sharing platform that cuts
across national boundaries—
 Development of virtual research communities

42. QUESTIONS?

43. CONNECT WITH ME
 Matthew Von Hendy
Green Heron Information Services
(240) 401-7433
info@greenheroninfo.com
www.greenheroninfo.com
LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/vonhendy
Twitter @GreenHeronInfo
Skype: vonhendy

44. THANK YOU!