PolyThinkers Pad

A wide selection of e-books at SpringerLink is now available for the Poly community to use on a trial basis through May 31st. SpringerLink offers journals and books in a variety of disciplines such as biomedicine, chemistry, physics, engineering, mathematics, computer science, humanities, and economics. Free access to tables of contents, detailed abstracts and editorial background are available for every publication, and full text is offered for many.

Take a moment to run a couple searches in SpringerLink and see how easy it is to narrow your results to fit your criteria. You can also sign up for alerts on the latest titles in your field. Give it a shot and let us know if you find it useful by leaving a comment below. Your feedback will help us decide whether or not to purchase this resource for the library.

Climate change, renewable energy, food shortages… unless you live in a cave, chances are you’ve heard or read about these important environmental issues in the media lately. Now you have a new resource at your disposal to help you research all things environmental: GreenFILE.

This bibliographic database from EBSCO draws on the connection between the environment and disciplines such as technology, health, education, and law. It contains nearly 300,000 citations of both scholarly and general interest titles, as well as government documents and reports. Full text is available for selected titles.

The library has been notified that the IEEE electronic journal service will be unavailable for approximately 4 hours this Saturday, March 15. This is due to an upgrade scheduled to start at about 11:00am EDT. If you need to download articles from IEEE, we hope you can plan around this service interruption. IEEE apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause and believes that the upgrade will result in better service.

Next time you need the latest information from the world’s top management and marketing journals, check out Business Source Elite (log-in required). It provides full text coverage for over 1,000 business and economics journals, including nearly 500 peer-reviewed publications. In addition to full text dating back as far as 1985, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 1,750 journals. Titles covered include: Forbes, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Research Technology Management, and many others. You can also look up detailed company profiles for the world’s 10,000 largest companies (click on “company profiles” under the advanced search tab).

Business Source Elite is one of the many databases that provides the Poly community with online access to scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, and reference books - most of which are available in full text. Log in with your Poly ID number and a world of valuable information awaits you. Visit the library website for a complete list of available databases.

Did you know that with just a New York state Drivers license, or a non-driver photo id, you have access to a wealth of free resources from NOVELNY? If you don’t have one of these, you can also gain access via a public library card from anywhere in New York State, or with the New York State Library Card available to all NY State residents upon request.

Searching the site is a snap. If you know the name of the magazine or journal you want, simply type it into the “Search magazines and newspapers by title” box. If you don’t know the name of a magazine, or don’t care from which available publication the information comes, use “Quick Database Search” to match your keywords with all the available resources.

The NOVEL library includes fewer resources than our own database collection or the resources of the major NYC public library systems, so it is best used as an additional avenue of information rather than as your main source.

Save time researching your favorite topics by having new information come to you. Depending on the database, you can have the latest table of contents from a particular journal or the latest article citations on a certain topic sent directly to your email.

Click the image to the right to view a three-minute demonstration on how to set up this feature in databases we subscribe to through EBSCOhost (Academic Search Elite, Business Source Elite, Health Source, MEDLINE and others).

We’ll be posting more useful tips for other databases on PolyThinkers Pad so check back often.

Recently, access to the IEEE database was interrupted for several days due to improper and excessive use by a Poly user. This is not only unethical but unlawful. Many users rely heavily on the library databases for their research needs. Those who abuse this privilege harm not just themselves, but countless others. Our staff works hard to provide the Poly community with the best resource help possible. Please help us by keeping your password safe and using the databases responsibly.

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.