Scopus Access 2010-2012

As a result of a 3 year agreement 2010 to 2012 between Universities Australia and Elsevier, QUT now has subscribed access to Scopus.

http://www.library.qut.edu.au/find/databases/fullrecord.jsp?id=5071

Scopus can be accessed by current QUT staff and students, QUT alumni and the general public when on campus. The Documentation & Help section also provides access to the new Scopus Resource Library

InfoScholar – info skills help for seasoned students

InfoScholar is an online information skills module (available via Blackboard) designed to help students develop advanced skills in finding and analysing information. Topics include:

• define your research topic
• design a search strategy
• carry out searches of information sources using a range of tools
• evaluate your search results
• identify methodologies, key sources and practitioners in your discipline area
• analyse and comment on work found
• identify avenues for further research
• understand the importance of citing the sources you use

It can be used in the students’ own time and can easily be adapted to suit a specific purpose. It is especially useful for research students or students in the later years of their degrees.

Academic staff: Link to InfoScholar from your Blackboard sites

Find InfoScholar here or do a Community search for “infoscholar” in Blackboard.

InfoScholar builds on PILOT which is aimed at students early in their academic life.

ticTOCS – new alerting service

Keeping up-to-date with the scholarly literature can be made easier by using services such as ticTOCs – Journal Tables of Contents Service http://www.tictocs.ac.uk.

ticTOCs is a new scholarly journal tables of contents (TOCs) service. It’s free, its easy to use, and it provides access to the most recent tables of contents of over 11,000 scholarly journals from more than 400 publishers. It helps scholars, researchers, academics and anyone else keep up-to-date with what’s being published in the most recent issues of journals on almost any subject.

You can save selected journals to MyTOCs so that you can view future TOCs (free registration is required if you want to permanently save your MyTOCs).

Check it out at http://www.tictocs.ac.uk.

There are also many other TOC services available – feel free to contact me if you need some assistance finding the best ones.

If you are a user of QUT ePrints, please read on…

The new look QUT ePrints was launched on Wednesday 3 December, and offers a number of benefits including:

• the ability to import information via a DOI or EndNote record, which will save time
• a cleaner user interface saved searches: get updates on new additions based on your search terms
• contextual help throughout the input forms
• QUT Login integration

The updated ePrints repository will start accepting new submissions from Monday 8 December 2008.

For more information about this service, please contact eprints@qut.edu.au

Interesting Research: Magic solar milestone reached

ARC Photovoltaic Centre of Excellence led by Professors Martin Green and Stuart Wenham, has again asserted its leadership in solar cell technology by reporting the first silicon solar cell to achieve the milestone of 25 per cent.

Centre Executive Research Director, Scienta Professor Martin Green, said the new world mark in converting incident sunlight into electricity was one of six new world records claimed by UNSW for its silicon solar technologies.

ARC Centre Director, Professor Stuart Wenham said the focus of the Centre is now improving mainstream production.  “Our main efforts now are focussed on getting these efficiency improvements into commercial production,” he said.  “Production compatible versions of our high efficiency technology are being introduced into production as we speak.”

The world-record holding cell was fabricated by former Centre researchers, Dr Jianhua Zhao and Dr Aihua Wang, who have since left the Centre to establish China Sunergy, one of the world’s largest photovoltaic manufacturers.  “China was the largest manufacturer of solar cells internationally in 2007 with 70 per cent of the output from companies with our former UNSW students either Chief Executive Officers or Chief Technical Officers”, said Professor Green.

For more information go to http://www.unsw.edu.au/news/pad/articles/2008/nov/Solar_record.html