TABLE OF CONTENTS

• IEEE and IEE journals available online
• Current Index to Statistics on the Web
• The Research Library and the Cerro Grande Fire
• Nature article surveys search engines
• Search techniques:  Searching for authors
• Search engine profile: Meta search engines continue to proliferate!

The Research Library now offers electronic access to approximately 120 journals published by IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and IEE (Institution of Electrical Engineers) from 1988 to the present.

You can get to IEEE and IEE journals directly in the following ways:
        * Access via Science Server® at LANL - http://sciserver.lanl.gov
        * Electronic Journals web page - http://lib-www.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/ejrnlsrch.cgi
        * By searching the online catalog, then following the link under Location: WWW.

Coming within the next week, you will see individual full-text PDF article links in our locally loaded citation databases (SciSearch® at LANL, INSPEC® at LANL, Engineering Index® at LANL, etc.). An article can be retrieved by clicking on the PDF icon appearing on a citation.  Articles for 2000 are currently being loaded.

Soon to come:
        * IEEE conferences full-text from 1988 to the present.
        * IEEE standards

The IEEE publishes more than 30% of the world's literature in electrical engineering and computer science, and IEEE journals and magazines are the top-cited publications in their respective fields.

Journals included:

Jeane Strub, Carol Hoover
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Access to the web version of Current Index to Statistics (http://query.statindex.org/) is now available to Laboratory researchers.  This is a collaborative project between TSA-1 and the Research Library. 

Current Index to Statistics is a bibliographic index to publications in statistics and related fields. Coverage begins in 1974.  This database indexes 106 core statistical journals, selected articles from about 900 additional journals, and about 8000 books in statistics published since 1974. The database is jointly sponsored by the American Statistical Association (ASA) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

One can limit searches based on document types:  journals, books, proceedings, e-journals, and computer readables.  Results can be returned in a tagged format or BibTeX format.  Abstracts are being included for some of the refereed journals affiliated with ASA and ISM beginning with 1992.  Coverage varies for each journal title.

The Gap project is inputting records on scientific papers that appeared in selected statistics and probability journals before 1975.  Records from Annals of   Mathematical Statistics now cover 1960 to the present.   The Journal of the American Statistical Association is now covered from 1955 to the present. More information is available at http://www.statindex.org/GenInfo/usrgdR7.pdf.

CIS is now at release 8.  On January 11, 2000 the version of the Current Index to Statistics available through the Query Page was updated to version 8, which includes publications through the end of 1998 plus some early 1999 publications.

http://www.statindex.org/GenInfo/CORE.V97 contains a listing of the core journals indexed by CIS.

Below is a sample record:
@article{beye:1998,
        Author = {Beyer, Andreas},
        Title = {Modelling Money Demand in {G}ermany},
        Year = 1998,
        Journal = {Journal of Applied Econometrics},
        Volume = 13,
        Pages = {57--76},
        Keywords = {Cointegration; Seasonality}

Frances Knudson
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Product Support. During the time that the fire swept through Los Alamos, and the Laboratory was closed, the electronic products provided by the Research Library continued to be available to customers.

• Library staff dialing in from home loaded a total of 97,561 records to the major databases, BIOSIS®, Engineering Index®, INSPEC®, SciSearch® and Social SciSearch®.
• In addition, the two weeks of Alerts (weekly updates) were delivered to 2,267 LANL customers and 2,895 external customers.

External Customer Usage. Customers from other Libraries who collaborate with the Research Library to use electronic databases and electronic journal articles continued to use products at an increasing rate. For the 15 days of May, ˝ month, the following usage occurred.

• Electronic database searches for May 8-23 totaled 35,555. The average monthly search usage for the major electronic databases is 51,681 per month.

• Journal article downloads for May 8-23 totaled 15,737. The average monthly journal downloads are 21,077 per month.

LANL Customer Usage. On the other hand, LANL staff did not actively use Library databases during this time.

• LANL electronic database searches for May 8-23 totaled 2,989. The average monthly search usage for the major electronic databases is 61,283 per month.

• Journal article downloads for May 8-23 totaled 1,773. The average monthly search usage for the major electronic databases is 11,383 per month.

During the first 48 hours after we returned we checked in 3,970 books. This equates to 43% of our monthly average.

Once the mail arrived during we also checked in 1,083 journal issues in less than three days to get that collection up to date.

Additionally, we have identified approximately 175 library books that were lost in either people's homes or offices. We have started to reorder these books for the collection.

Jackie Stack
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A recent issue of Nature (May 11, p.112) contains a survey article on the state of search engines from the point of view of scientists attempting to find information on the Web. Since many researchers have completely stopped using the Web because of the quality of information they were finding, perhaps this article, "Souped-up search engines" by Declan Butler, will inspire a few people to try some of the future search engines.

Butler believes that the introduction of XML can be seen as a major facilitator for the new technologies. Because most search engines work with "crawler" programs you have probably noticed that the results are often poor except in areas of popular culture. By using a highly developed bag of tricks, the most content-free sites can now regularly appear near the top of your hit list. Nature predicts that keyword searching will soon vanish and that dedicated science search portals will provide us with customized/personalized information. LANL's own aha! search directory is working in this direction. Some of the new approaches include variations on citation analysis and the use of web links, as currently utilized by the Google engine. A further development is analyzing links and generating "hubs,"pages that have many links to link-ranked pages. This "hub" concept is being featured in work at the IBM Almaden Center. The IBM engine, named Clever, starts its search by first pulling together information in PDFs, since the majority of science articles are in that format.

Other approaches include ResearchIndex.com at NEC which is testing a theory of automatic citation analysis on a very large archive of computer science papers. DualNAVI, being developed at Hitachi in Japan, is based on ideas about the visual presentation of the information analysis that has been performed. Meanwhile, Collexis and Autonomy are developing engines using concept matching.

The Nature article concludes with a list of links to these new search engines. Lab users can see the article electronically by following the link and using the passwords found on the Nature description page accessible through the Research Library Electronic Journals site.

Donna Berg
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Searching the literature by author is not always as simple as you might think.  In the databases locally mounted by the Research Library, the following techniques should help. 

For BIOSIS®, Engineering Index, DOE Energy Science and Technology, INSPEC, and Nuclear Science Abstracts:

To search on author initials, follow the last name with a space (no comma) and use a space or a period following each initial. To search on first names, follow the last name with a space (no comma) and then the first name. When searching author names containing hyphens or apostrophes, search with punctuation or substitute a space instead.

Examples:

cox retrieves all authors with the last name Cox

cox a. or cox a retrieves all authors with the last name Cox and with the single or first initial A.

cox a.l. or cox a l retrieves all authors with the last name Cox and with the initials A.L.

cox alan retrieves all authors with the last name Cox and with the first name Alan.

cox a <or> cox a l <or> cox alan <or> cox alan l retrieves all variations of this author.

lopez aguilar or lopez-aguilar retrieves the compound last name

o brian or o'brian retrieves a last name containing an apostrophe

petrov yu i  retrieves a name with the Russian initial Yu

Other tips:

• Some of these databases use only initials, and some use both initials and first names:

  	BIOSIS	initials and first names
  	Engineering Index	initials and first names
  	DOE Energy Sci. and Tech.	initials  (after 1998, some names in direct order)
  	INSPEC	initials
  	Nuclear Science Abstracts	initials

• For names containing umlauts, for complete results search without the umlaut as well as substituting the letter e for the umlaut, for example, Muller and Mueller.
• An author search will find the second part of compound names, which is helpful if you are uncertain what part of an author's name is listed as the surname. For example, Vidal finds Vidal and Garcia-Vidal.
• Do not use a comma after the surname, since the comma is a special relevancy character and will break your request into separate searches for the surname and for the initial(s).

SciSearch® at LANL and Social SciSearch® at LANL use only initials, and the initials are run together. So, for example:

mitchell e retrieves all authors with the last name Mitchell and with the first initial E (and no other initials)

mitchell ea retrieves all authors with the last name Mitchell and with the initials E. A.

mitchell e? retrieves all authors with the last name Mitchell, the first initial E, plus one single middle initial (avoid using the asterisk in this field). If unsure whether or not a middle initial is used, search both mitchell e <or> mitchell e?

Also, compound names are run together as one word: orourke or garciacarmona retrieves authors whose last names contain punctuation, such as O'Rourke or Garcia-Carmona

e-Print arXiv:  In this database the author field includes last names, first names or initials, and sometimes city, country and institution. Because there is no standardization in how author names appear, finding all occurences of a given author may require some ingenuity. Names are usually in direct order (e.g. John Smith) rather than inverted order (Smith, John). Try combining a last name and first name/initials with <and>.

Kathy Varjabedian
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Two new meta search engines are worth a test. SearchWiz.com allows you to choose from ten favorite engines. Findings are loaded and delivered promptly. I especially like the clear display of the top ten results from each engine. The home page has a feature to allow for three types of subset searching for people, business and yellow pages. These subset searches were slow and the information inaccurate, as is often the case using telephone directory based information. SearchWiz would do well to drop these features from their home page or upgrade them dramatically.

SherlockHound.Com is a lot to type but this service adds five search engines more than SearchWiz and allows you to choose to search "on the Web" or "in newsgroups." It is surprising how many esoteric topics are covered in newsgroups -- but buyer beware when it comes to the veracity of the information! Still, some newsgroup discussions can be extremely informative and revealing.

One of my favorite engines has resurfaced with some hot features.  Fast, now found at www.alltheweb.com, has a crisp, cleanly designed home page with informative links and features. They have added an advanced search page that provides word filters and domain filters. This search engine continues to be one of the speediest and contains very relevant hits.

Donna Berg
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Newsletter Editorial Team: Donna Berg, Helen Boorman, Jack Carter, Lou Pray, and Kathy Varjabedian.

The name and e-mail address of the Library member who contributed an article appears at the end of the article. If you have comments or further questions, please contact that person. If you have general questions or comments about the Newsletter itself, please contact the Newsletter Editor, Kathy Varjabedian.

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