National Science Week 2009

The Academy Library’s  theme is Astronomy: Science of the Universe in recognition of the International Year of Astronomy. To celebrate, there will be a display in the Library foyer from 15 August until 29 August. Dr Stephen James, PEMS, will give a talk on Astronomy on Thursday 20 August 1230-1330 in the Library. Please come and bring your lunch. The Library will provide tea and coffee. Details about National Science Week can be found at www.scienceweek.gov.au

Five slick search engines you should know about

Any debate over which search engine is the best usually focuses on the “big two”: Google and Yahoo.

The University of California Berkeley Library recommends clients get “a second opinion” when searching the internet. Which search engines do they recommend for a second opinion?

1. Exalead
2. Scour
3. Hunch
4. Scirus
5. Indeed

Extracted from “Five slick search engines you should know about” published 30 June 2009 on Computerworld.

What is Bing?

Microsoft has released its own search engine called Bing.

Like most search engines, Bing offers options to narrow a search to specific types of results, ie web, images, videos, news, maps and other options. Unlike Google, you need to enter a search statement before you can access any advanced search options. Like Google, you can limit your search to results only from Australian sources.

Bing has made it’s homepage a little more interesting than most. The image changes regularly, and offers interactive elements relating to the image. Run your cursor over the image and watch out for the little information boxes.

Despatches from Gallipoli

Despatches from Gallipoli: Scenes from a Remote War is an online exhibition hosted by the National Library of Australia which includes scanned images of despatches from four Gallipoli war correspondents: C.E.W. Bean, Keith Murdoch, Philip Schuler, and Charles Smith. Included are some 200 newspaper articles, images and interpretative pieces.

Information about other online exhibitions is available from the
National Library website.

Publish or Perish

Do you want to include evidence of the impact of your research? Is your work cited in journals which are not ISI listed? Are you applying for tenure, promotion or a new job? Then you might want to try Publish or Perish, designed to help individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage. http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm

Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents the following statistics:

• Total number of papers
• Total number of citations
• Average number of citations per paper
• Average number of citations per author
• Average number of papers per author
• Average number of citations per year
• Hirsch’s h-index and related parameters
• Egghe’s g-index
• The contemporary h-index
• The age-weighted citation rate
• Two variations of individual h-indices
• An analysis of the number of authors per paper

Publish or Perish provides cool bibliometrics  and is very easy to download (free).