PAM Bulletin: Vol. 30, No. 4

PAMnet News

More threads from the past quarter can be found in the PAMnet Discussion Archive at: http://listserv.nd.edu/archives/pamnet.html.

Good News
Congratulations to PAM members Christina Birdie and Pradyna Yogesh for winning the SLA Diversity Leadership Development Award!

http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0302&L=pamnet&P=R817

SLA name change led by "Branding Task Force"
Liz Bryson posted comments from Library Juice regarding the SLA name change led by the SLA Branding Task Force. Sparks flew as PAM members debated this issue. Sarah Stevens-Rayburn summed up some PAM members thoughts when she stated, "I prefer to continue being part of the profession that preserves, advances, and promulgates knowledge, not just information." Corinne Machado suggested that PAM members read "Choosing a New Name-Pandora's Quandary!" http://www.sla.org/documents/choosinganewname.doc and believes "times have changed, and so have the words that are used to describe the 'stewards of information.'" This debate continues….

"Politics of publication"
John Grula posted a message about the article by Peter A. Lawrence, "The Politics of Publication," which is on pp. 259-261 of the March 20, 2003, Nature.

Michael Fosmire believes, "SPARC titles have generally received pretty high impact factors-an indication that they are being accepted by the scientific community." Shrinking journal budgets and rising costs force tough decisions, and PAM members continue to try to educate their faculty and students about the economics of publishing.

USA Patriot Act
David Stern posted part of an email from another unnamed member that urged PAM members to read the recent article that is very critical of the ALA's position on the Patriot Act and even calls for Friedman's resignation. Silvio Levy directs PAM members to several articles on that site, including:

http://www.counterpunch.org/price03062003.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/gelsey0717.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/brasch0725.html
http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0304&L=pamnet&F=&S=&P=1315
http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0304&L=pamnet&F=&S=&P=1520
http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0304&L=pamnet&F=&S=&P=1751
http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0304&L=pamnet&F=&S=&P=2028
http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0304&L=pamnet&F=&S=&P=2375

Bibliometric Question
Gary Davidoff posted a question regarding how to find the impact factor of a journal right after publication. In what turned out to be a complex answer many PAM members posted comments to his question. Guenther Eichhorn replied that one could find a preprint of a soon to be published article regarding this by emailing mkurtz@cfa.harvard.edu. Virginia Smith posted information about Liz Bryson's recent paper and pointed out that the upcoming publication of the LISA IV proceedings has several articles about bibliometrics. Marc Brodsky, of AIP, believes that online usage of backfiles is changing the impact factor of older journals. AIP data shows that of "over 350,000 different articles on AIP's OJPS system, over 175,000 different articles are downloaded each month." Since there are only about 60,000 new articles added each year, many of the downloaded articles are older material. Carol Hutchins points out that, "that it is important to have use and 'impact' data partitioned by year(s). The way stats are gathered and in turn reported from server activity may lump everything together." Hutchins suggests referring to the ReedElsCustomers listserv and the COUNTER project, http://www.projectcounter.org, for more information. Brian Simboli sent in a "Cited Half-Life" formula and states that this would be useful to look at when one is making decisions about journals kept on-site or at remote storage. Travis Brooks, SPIRES, points out that that for high energy physics papers the half-life is about 18 months. His work can be found at http://opcit.eprints.org/tdb198/opcit/citationage/. Joe Kraus contributed five very useful citations for fairly recent journal articles covering citation distribution and analysis.

MATH: journal rankings
A question was posted by Cynthia Holt about finding the top mathematics journals. Bob Michaelson suggested the 2001 issue of ISI's Sci-Bytes, http://in-cites.com/research/2001/oct_15_2001-2.html which has an article on "Journals Ranked by Impact: Mathematics." Mary Rose Muccie points out that that the ISI article ranks general mathematics and not applied, which would leave out SIAM journals. Jane Kinkus pointed out the AMS's journal price survey which might give some clues on affordability:

http://www.ams.org/membership/journal-survey.html
http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0301&L=pamnet&F=&S=&P=2888
http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0301&L=pamnet&F=&S=&P=12119
http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0301&L=pamnet&F=&S=&P=12628
http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0301&L=pamnet&F=&S=&P=12832
http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0301&L=pamnet&F=&S=&P=13006

DOI resolution
Michael Fosmire posted a question about how to match a DOI to an actual article. Bernd-Christoph Kamper, Mark Doyle, and Alberto Accomazzi suggest resolving the DOI at http://dx.doi.org/. Adam Philippidis also suggested using the free plug-in available at http://www.handle.net/resolver/index.html. This plug-in treats the DOI like a URL and takes you to the article.

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Published by
Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics Division of the Special Libraries Association
ISSN 1063-9136.