Before coming to class on Monday, October 16, please do the following:
During class, I will give a short talk and then you can work on the assignment for the rest of the hour.
Please submit the assignment as a Word file in Canvas.
The purpose of this assignment is to 1) learn how to discover the scholarly communication about a research area over time, and 2) learn about the concept of scholarly impact of articles and the tools used to measure that impact. We will use the multidisciplinary database Web of Science to do both activities. It tracks how many times a journal article is cited, which connects the article with research that came before and after and is one indicator of the value of an article to a discipline.
Scholarly impact refers to the influence and recognition a scholar has in their field through mainly academic journal articles and books. Impact has traditionally been measured by how how many times a book or article is cited, which is called bibliometrics. Slowly, mentions of publications in social media - tweets and posts - are being accepted as evidence of impact. The counting of tweets, posts, etc. about publications is called altmetrics.
Web of Science is a journal article database and a bibliometric tool that monitors the number of times a journal article has been cited. Scholars usually interpret a high number of cites to mean an article is important in its field and contains significant findings. However, it can also mean that the article is controversial and researchers cite it when disagreeing with its findings.
Analysis of citations also lets us trace the development of an area of research into the past and future. By looking at who has cited a journal article, we can see what knowledge scientists have more recently added to that research field. By looking at the references in an article, we can travel back to the foundational information that was published earlier, For your library assignment, you'll be learning to do a cited reference search in Web of Science to follow the development of a research area by seeing how many cites an older article has and to find the articles that cite it.
Learn much more about determining and increasing scholarly impact at the Increase Your Scholarly Impact library guide.
Watch this video for an introduction to searching in Web of Science. Some important points to remember about Web of Science:
Watch this video to learn how to do a Cited Reference Search. Why should you do this search in Web of Science instead of just looking at Times Cited for an article in the Documents Search? You can usually find more citations in the Cited Reference Search because it identifies citations:
Watch this video to learn how to export the article references you want to save from Web of Science to RefWorks, which you will do for your assignment. Note: Direct export to RefWorks is no longer available in Web of Science. Instead, export an RIS file and then import it into RefWorks - this is called indirect export.
Watch this video from the University of Louisville to learn how to find out what the h index for an author is and how to find it in Web of Science. Skip to minute 2:40 in the video for information about the h index. The h index has these limitations:
Interlibrary Loan is a service provided to you by the Libraries and funded by your library fees. Use this service to get articles, books and more that we don't have at the UNT Libraries. To get started, you must create an ILLiad account. Watch the video, Interlibrary Loan Service, for more help.
Articles, conference proceedings, and book chapters are scanned and emailed to the UNT Libraries. It takes approximately 3 to 4 days for an electronic document to be delivered to your account, and sometimes as little as 24 hours. You will be notified by email when the electronic document arrives in your ILLiad account.
Print books, theses, and dissertations take longer to deliver to UNT. Books take 1 to 2 weeks and theses and dissertations can take up to 6 weeks. You can have these delivered to the UNT library of your choice through your ILLiad User Information.
