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6 March 2007

More Tools for Research

It’s been a while since Jens and I summarized some useful tools for research. Since then more productivity tools have appeared that make life easy for researchers. Some of the following might only work for Harvard affiliates but maybe your outfit offers something similar.

First, Harvard offers a table of contents service. After signing up you can request to receive the table of contents of most journals that Harvard Libraries carries. The handy part is a “Find it @ Harvard” button next to each article; clicking it takes you to the article through the library's account so that you have full access. This service also allows you to manage all journal subscriptions through only one account. (Best make the service email you the TOC as attachment, as in-text tables occasionally get cut off. Also, your spam filter might intercept those emails so check there if you don’t receive anything.)

Second, Harvard provides a new toolbar for the Firefox browser called LibX (see here). This provides quick links to Harvard’s e-tools (citation index, e-resources etc), lets you search in the Hollis catalog and provides a drag&drop field for Google Scholar. If you’re on a journal website without having gone through Harvard libraries, LibX allows you to reload the restricted webpage via Harvard to access to the full-text sources. Another nice feature is that LibX embeds cues in webpages. For example if you have installed the tool and are looking at a book on Amazon, you will notice a little Harvard shield on the page. Clicking it takes you straight to the book’s entry in Hollis. LibX also provides automatic links to print and e-resources for ISBN, DOI’s and other identifiers.

There are other useful tools for Firefox. I recently discovered the ScrapBook add-on which essentially works like bookmarks, but allows you to store only the part of a web page you’re interested in. Simply select the part and store it in your scrapbook. You can then access it offline and also comment or highlight. You can sort and import/export items too. A further useful built-in function uses search keywords in Firefox. This allows you to access a search box on any website through a user-defined keyword. For example you can define ``gs'' as keyword for the search box on the Google Scholar website. Then entering ``gs'' and a search term in the location bar in Firefox takes you straight to the search results for that term. If you use Google Scholar through your library you'll even get full access to the articles straight away.

Posted by Sebastian Bauhoff at 7:07 PM