As an experiment, we are going to blog on a database or an electronic journal of interest, one per month during the semester. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to use the comment or email us.
This idea occurred to me when I stumbled upon a journal I hadn't known about before, Science Progress, which is our inaugural subject for this series.
What I like best about Science Progress is that it provides review articles on hot topics aimed at college students or scientists who are not experts in the field in question. Librarians often get students looking for articles which are written in language they can understand.
Most issues don't have a theme, and cover the waterfront, so to speak. But some issues have theme topics. For instance, in the current issue (Vol. 92, no. 2 - July 2008), all but one of the articles are about the effects of climate change on polar regions; it includes individual articles on climate change and whales and seals, polar bears, arctic fox, microbiology of the Antarctic Peninsular region, and (the non-polar one) butterflies as indicators of climate change. The articles are not short - the shortest in this issue is 9 pages (the one on butterflies), the longest 34 (whales & seals), and all contain extensive bibliographies, as one would expect in a review article.
The UMass Amherst campus has access to current issues electronically only, through a vendor, IngentaConnect. Publication of Science Progress seems to be a little erratic - but generally they put out 3-4 issues per year. It is published in Britain, so there is a tendency for the articles to be focused on Britain - e.g., the article above is about butterflies in Britain.
If you'd like to see recent issues of this journal (back to 2001), use the Library's link to the title through the catalog or e-journal list, or click here on this IngentaConnect link to Science Progress. We have earlier issues (v.11 (1916)-v.87 (2004)) in paper as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment