This month ScienceWatch.com released the highest-cited papers from 20 countries spanning the globe.  The countries featured were selected based on their papers published in Thomson Reuters-indexed journals from January 1998 through August 31, 2008.

The United States ranked number one with 2,959,661 papers and 42,269,694 citations.  The most cited article comes from the field of clinical medicine: “Mechanisms of disease: atherosclerosis – an inflammatory disease” (full text available in ProQuest).

In addition to clinical medicine, disciplines covered in the top 20 papers include: biochemistry, chemistry, physics, materials science and computer science.

ScienceWatch.com provides a behind-the-scenes look at the scientists, journals, institutions, nations, and papers selected by Essential Science Indicators.

JSTOR offers a high-quality, interdisciplinary archive of over one thousand leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as select monographs and other materials. The entire database is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references.

Journals are always included from volume 1, issue 1 and include previous and related titles. The most recently published issues (past 3-5 years) are not available. However, users can search this material and link to the publisher’s site or other online source for access.

To learn how to search, browse, and manage citations using JSTOR, watch these video tutorials.

A new open access journal of interest to the bioinformatics community, DATABASE - The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation, will be released in January, 2009 . The online-only journal is now accepting submissions for publication.

The journal seeks to provide a platform for novel ideas in database research surrounding biological information and will reportedly cover only open-access databases.

As described on the Oxford Journals web site:

Huge volumes of primary data are currently archived in numerous open-access databases, and with new generation technologies becoming more common in laboratories, large datasets will become even more prevalent than today. The archiving, curation, analysis and understanding of all of this data is a challenge.

[Read more →]

Environment Complete offers deep coverage in a wide variety of disciplines including ecosystem ecology, energy, renewable energy sources, natural resources, geography, pollution & waste management, environmental technology, public policy, social impacts, urban planning, and more. Environment Complete contains more than 1,957,000 records from more than 1,700 domestic and international titles going back to the 1940s.

The database contains full text for more than 680 journals such as:

• American Journal of Environmental Sciences
• Atmospheric Chemistry & Physics
• Ecologist
• Journal of Environmental Engineering & Science
• Power Engineering
• Pollution Engineering

In addition, it provides full text for 120 monographs, such as Encyclopedia of World Environmental History (3 volumes), Advances in Water Treatment & Environmental Management, and many others.

Cornell University Libraries recently announced that arXiv, the free online repository for articles in physics, math, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics, now contains over half a million articles.

arXiv was developed in 1991 and is the oldest online article repository in existence. Researchers upload their own articles to arXiv, and they are usually made available to the public the next day. A team of 113 volunteer moderators from around the world screen submissions and recommend whether they should be included in the repository.

arXiv has long stood at the forefront of the open-access movement and served as the model for many other initiatives, including the National Institute of Health’s PubMedCentral. It is currently ranked the No. 1 repository in the world by the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities.

More information is available in the Press Release issued by Cornell University.

Ever wanted to see evolution in progress? Thanks to a unique open source internet project, you can bring the process of evolution into your computer and witness it at home.

The project, Darwin@Home, is an exercise in cyber-biology that aims to demystify evolution as well as inspire.  Watch the video below to see “creatures” (i.e. simple mathematical systems) demonstrate bizarre walking strategies that have evolved from computer simulations of evolution.

Founded in 1932, Annual Reviews provides researchers and professors with a definitive academic resource in 37 scientific disciplines. Annual Reviews saves you time by synthesizing the vast amount of primary research literature and identifying the principal contributions in your field.

Editorial committees comprised of the most distinguished scholars in the discipline select all topics for review, and the articles are written by authors who are recognized experts in the field. Annual Reviews publications are among the highest cited publications by impact factor according to the Institute for Scientific Information.

Some of the titles include:

• Analytical Chemistry
• Biochemistry
• Biomedical Engineering
• Biophysics
• Cell and Developmental Biology
• Computer Science
• Fluid Mechanics
• Materials Research
• Nuclear and Particle Science
• Physical Chemistry

Browse the complete list (log in required when off campus).

In-cites compiled the 100 most-cited scientists for 2007 in the following fields:

• Biology & Biochemistry
• Chemistry
• Economics & Business
• Immunology
• Microbiology
• Molecular Biology & Genetics
• Neuroscience & Behavior
• Pharmacology & Toxicology
• Physics

In accordance with a new spending bill signed by President Bush last month, all research funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will now be required to be published online, free to the public, within 12 months after publication in any scientific journal. Seeing as NIH has a $29 billion research budget, this new directive should open up a world of new opportunities for online research.

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Open Access publishing continues to rise at an astronomical rate as researchers hope to maximize their impact by providing free access to their scholarly articles online. But all this newly available material does little good if you don’t know where to find it. Fortunately the good folks at Lund University in Sweden have created the Directory of Open Access Journals.

The Directory of Open Access Journals is a carefully vetted list of fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals covering all subjects and languages. It currently lists a total of 2,870 journals, with a net growth rate of 1.2 titles per calendar day over the past year. The directory aims to be a “one stop shop for users to Open Access Journals.”

Subjects covered in the Directory include: [Read more →]