Library Facts for Faculty

Welcome back, faculty!  Or, in the case of brand new faculty—welcome to Arkansas Tech!  The Ross Pendergraft Library offers many services to support the research, curriculum, and curiosity needs of faculty, on or off-campus.  Here’s a list of a few of top-requested services and resources from the faculty to help introduce you to the Library.  For an abbreviated summary of our resources, check out our Library Resources for Faculty guide.

Course Reserves

Would you like to set aside a book, a textbook, or a DVD for your students at a Circulation Desk?  Faculty can share their own copy or select a library item to put on course reserve for limited-checkout to their students.  To get started, fill out the form that best describes your material:

Once the items are placed on reserve, they can be searched by course number, professor name, or title using our online catalog, course reserve drop-down.

finditcourse

Library Instruction

If there’s a research paper or project on your course syllabus, and you are already bracing yourself for Wikipedia citations, consider inviting one of our librarians over for a quick tutorial on library resources.

In 50 minutes or less, a librarian can help de-mystify searching, finding, and citing for basic scholarly research.  In addition to classroom instruction, we can provide tours, short overviews of library databases, or more focused tutorials on subject-specific projects and papers.  If you are teaching a Research Methods class, this service can be particularly valuable.  Contact us at askalibrarian@atu.edu to schedule a session.

Resource Guides

Don’t have time for dedicated instruction on library materials?  The librarians are hard at work building online research guides devoted to specific subjects, majors, and even specific courses.  Custom guides can be built for use with specific projects, or generic guides tweaked to include added information.  These are great places to start students down the right path to subject-specific databases, journals, citation help, and more.  Browse our current collection for research guides to share in class or send us an email with your own suggestions and requests.

RefWorks

If you are producing scholarly research, this tool is invaluable for managing citations, importing references, and creating bibliographies.  Most commonly described as “something I wish I had known about when working on my PhD”, use Refworks to access and organize your citations from anywhere. Find embedded links within our databases and online catalog to quickly add references to your lists.  Export directly into Microsoft Word your fully-formatted bibliography in whichever citation style you choose.

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Want to read it?  For free?  The library has a subscription.  Follow this link:

http://bit.ly/2bBGzcl 

Click on “View Online” to see the link for full-text for current articles and older content back for two years.  You can also search the title in our library catalog to find the print issues, the electronic archives, and specific articles.

Interlibrary Loan

The library has expanded our collection tremendously in the past few years, but as academic material costs continue to rise, we struggle sometimes to meet all the research needs of faculty.  Enter the twin engines of speed and customer service:  ILLiad and the outstanding department of Interlibrary Loan.

Our Interlibrary Loan services help you obtain full-text articles and books not held in our own collection.  The ILLiad software makes requesting materials from our databases a breeze.  Look for the ILLiad logo every time you see a citation without full-text access:

illiad

Use our WorldCat database for requesting books not held in our collection—you’ll find the ILLiad logo there, too.   Login to ILLiad directly with your Tech username and password to track requests, view received articles, and more.

Have a problem or a question?  Get in touch with our Interlibrary Loan specialist (a.k.a. your new best friend) who will go to the ends of the earth to find what you need.  You can also call or stop by the ILL office in RPL 124 during regular office hours.

Citation Measurement

On occasion, we are asked for help finding citation metrics to help faculty measure the number of articles referencing their work.  Here are a few tools to assist in obtaining these numbers:

  • Web of Science: This is the most authoritative source for citation metrics in the sciences and social sciences. You can find Web of Science in our list of A-Z Databases.   Search for your article or yourself as an author to view the number of times your work has been cited.  Arkansas Tech currently subscribes to the Science Citation Index only, however, so analysis in other disciplines (e.g. arts and humanities) will be limited.

webofsci

  • GoogleScholar: This a free service offered by Google, and considered the largest collection of citation metrics.  Google’s web-crawler has captured millions of citations from publisher sites, institutional repositories, and individual author sites.  However, it is prone to over-inflated metrics at times because it includes so-called “ghost citations’ like duplicate foreign language translations and falsely attributed citations.  Be careful using these numbers for true indications of research quantity and quality without verifying the sources of the citations.

googlscholar2

  • Publish or Perish by Harzing: This software tool can perform citation analysis using information from Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic (still in early development stages).  The software not only provides a citation analysis of individual works, but also of the scholarly output and measure of a single author or an entire journal.  It is capable of calculating metrics like H-Index, G-Index, and other citation ranking statistics.

Did we leave something off this list?  Contact your factual, faculty-friendly librarians at askalibrarian@atu.edu.  You can also keep in touch with new library news through our Facebook and Twitter.  Happy New Year!