Dibner Library now offers easy online access to the research journals published by the American Chemical Society.  With this new database, you can access some of the most cited peer-reviewed journals in the chemical and related sciences.

In addition to 34 research journals, the society also publishes the premier weekly news magazine of the chemical enterprise, Chemical & Engineering News.  ACS Publications provides searchable access to over 130 years of original research in chemistry, including more than 750,000 articles dating back to the inaugural volume of the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 1879.

The journals included in this database cover a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines— biotechnology, analytical chemistry, applied chemistry, biochemistry & molecular biology, chemical biology, chemical engineering, computer science, energy & fuels, food science, environmental science, inorganic & nuclear chemistry, material science, medicinal chemistry, organic chemistry, pharmacology, physical chemistry, polymer science, and toxicology.

The Dibner Library now offers online access to many of the journals published by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), the largest organization in Europe for advancing the chemical sciences. Log in to the RSC database to explore this rich collection that covers the major areas of chemistry - physical, inorganic, organic, and materials.

The flagship journal from the RSC is Chemical Communications, which publishes short reports of the most innovative research in all areas of the chemical sciences. Other journals covered in the library’s subscription include:

•  Annual Reports Sections A, B & C
•  The Analyst
•  Analytical Abstracts
•  Catalysts & Catalysed Reactions
•  Chemical Society Reviews

[Read more →]

If you need quick, online access to engineering reference books, check out Referex. Available through Engineering Village, Referex is a specialized database that gives you access to premium e-books that provide engineering students and professionals with the answers and information they require. It is fully searchable and instantly delivers full-text content of hundreds of e-book titles in the following collections:

• Chemical, Petrochemical and Process Engineering
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Electronics and Electrical Engineering
• Civil and Environmental Engineering

Each collection includes:

• Handbooks of engineering fundamentals
• Situational reference
• Titles focused on technique and practice
• How to guides
• Highly specialized professional information

To use this expansive collection of e-books, simply click Referex and log in using your last name and student ID number. You can search all the collections at once or select an individual collection to search or browse.

An international group of leading technological thinkers identified the biggest challenges for engineers in the 21st century. Their conclusions are now available in the report, Grand Challenges for Engineering. The National Academy of Engineering released the report, which identifies 14 areas awaiting engineering solutions, on February 15, 2008.

Here’s the full list of challenges from the academy’s experts:

• Make solar energy economical
• Provide energy from fusion
• Develop carbon sequestration methods
• Manage the nitrogen cycle
• Provide access to clean water
• Restore and improve urban infrastructure
• Advance health informatics
• Engineer better medicines
• Reverse-engineer the brain
• Prevent nuclear terror
• Secure cyberspace
• Enhance virtual reality
• Advance personalized learning
• Engineer the tools of scientific discovery

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the non-regulatory federal agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce, promotes U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology. The agency publishes standards many of which are free, including Ceramics WebBook, Chemistry WebBook and Physical Reference Data. To satisfy your curiosity, check out the complete list at the NIST Data Gateway, and get to know your standards.

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 →]

TechXtra is a free service which can help you find articles, books, the best websites, the latest industry news, job announcements, technical reports, technical data, full text eprints, the latest research, thesis & dissertations, teaching and learning resources and more, in engineering, mathematics and computing.

From the website:

TechXtra searches parts of the Web that Google doesn’t, and TechXtra helps you find subject-based information, which Google doesn’t do very well. Many of the things you’ll find through TechXtra come from the “Hidden Web,” and are not indexed by Google.

An important note: Search Dibner Library’s subscription databases first since we may have paid access to some of the resources you will find on TechXtra. Also remember that if they are not free and we don’t have a subscription, you may always make a request using our online document delivery form.

TechXtra is now available in the list of Research Tools in the blog’s right sidebar. Give Google a rest and check out the other great tools listed there when you want to conduct a more focused search.

ChemxSeer is a new publicly available search engine that knows when “He” refers to helium and not a person.

Searching for chemical formulae can be a challenge using popular search engines. ChemxSeer is “an integrated digital library and database allowing for intelligent search of documents in the chemistry domain.” One of databases useful features is its ability to automatically identify tables in digital documents and extract the contents of those tables. This new resource is sure to be a time saver for those who do chemistry research online.