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Weekly News Digest

October 11, 2012 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.

Presidential Documents App Available From GPO, National Archives

• Executive orders
• Speeches
• Statements
• Communications to Congress and federal agencies
• Approved acts
• Nominations submitted to the Senate
• White House announcements
• White House press releases

The app has user-friendly search capabilities, allowing users to access content about the president by searching by date, category, subject, or location, which includes a map feature. This is the first time GPO has enabled an app with a geolocation feature, providing users with access to the most recent content near their location. The public can take advantage of the free mobile web app on most major mobile device platforms. GPO and OFR also make available the Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents on GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys).

The Presidential Documents app is the third app released by GPO; other apps include the FY 2013 Budget app and the Mobile Member Guide, which provides users with official biographical information about members of the 112th Congress. GPO has also supported the Library of Congress in creating an iPad app for the Congressional Record. The Presidential Documents app represents the first app for the OFR and the third app for the National Archives.

To get the app, go to http://m.gpo.gov/dcpd. For security reasons, the app does not include future presidential schedules.

Source: Government Printing Office

MapLight Money and Politics Data Set Launches

Citizens, journalists, and programmers can now view, search, sort, filter, and visualize (with charts, line graphs, bar graphs, scatter plots, and timelines) federal campaign contributions using Google Fusion Tables. Data can also be merged with outside databases, and visualizations can be easily embedded into blogs, media sites, and more.

The MapLight Money and Politics Data Set can also be downloaded or accessed via API by citizens and journalists for free noncommercial use in websites, widgets, and apps. The data set includes continually updated information on all current candidates for the House, Senate, and U.S. President—including how much each has raised and spent—making it easy for election-related websites to integrate this newsworthy information.

Source: MapLight

EBSCO Adds Health Economic Evaluations Database

The database includes more than 47,500 selected records, bibliographies, and data from more than 5,000 journals. HEED also includes, in bibliographic detail, entries from the Wellcome and Battelle databases of economic evaluation literature. About 250 new references are added to HEED with each monthly update.

HEED is an international database and will appeal to health economists spanning the globe. This resource includes 1,500 English abstracts of non-English evaluations in the main languages (Russian, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese).

HEED is available via EBSCOhost. Users can customize their searches with a variety of search options and limiters along with an intuitive approach to searching online databases. More information about HEED and other multidisciplinary medical databases from EBSCO Publishing is available at www.ebscohost.com/biomedical-libraries/subjects/category/multi-disciplinary-medical.

Source: EBSCO Publishing

Elsevier’s Scopus Now Accessible Within EBSCO Discovery Service

“Expanding the discoverability of Scopus content for researchers is one of our most important goals,” commented Cameron Ross, head of product management for Scopus. “EBSCO Discovery Service will let Scopus subscribers use their library’s standard search interface to widen their search to quickly find information. Researchers at institutions that subscribe to both will now have access to citation data as well as other in-depth analytical tools that will enable them to achieve better research outcomes.”

The Scopus database includes the abstracts and references of 19,500 peer-reviewed journals from more than 5,000 international publishers. Scopus offers scholars a comprehensive resource to support their research needs in the scientific, technical, medical, and social sciences fields, as well as in the arts and humanities.

Elsevier is part of a growing list of publishers and other content partners that are taking part in EDS to bring more visibility to their content. The EDS Base Index represents content from about 20,000 providers (and growing), which accounts for more than 350,000 publications from top publishers and information providers. However, because EDS is a custom solution, the complete index to materials for any given customer may be expanded greatly beyond the coverage referenced for the Base Index.

Source: EBSCO Publishing 

ProQuest Expands Support for Research in Arts and Humanities

“Periodicals Archive Online is the kind of resource that allows researchers to work strategically,” said Mary Sauer-Games, ProQuest vice president of publishing. “It gathers the resources that have been typically hard to find and access and makes them easy to search in a very targeted way.”

With more than 15 million pages and 3 million articles, Periodicals Archive Online is a growing virtual library comprising core academic journals as well as rare specialized titles. Periodicals Archive Online’s 10^th collection includes international titles such as Queen’s Quarterly, Cahiers d’histoire mondiale, L’Homme et la société, and Libri, along with regional works, including Tennessee Historical Quarterly and Kentucky Folklore Record. Journals are digitized cover to cover, from volume 1, issue 1 and some 20% are in non-English languages, providing the broad international coverage that researchers require to publish on the global stage. Its fast search engine enables powerful and intuitive searching across this vast body of content.

Source: ProQuest 

Chemical Abstracts Service Upgrades SciFinder

Scientists can now group reactions in answer sets according to more than 500 commonly known reaction types, e.g., reduction of nitro compounds to amines. This feature will help in quickly examining the diversity of a large set of reactions.

CAS also introduced a sharing feature for SciPlanner, the interactive workspace in SciFinder that enables scientists to more quickly identify synthesis options. New SciPlanner import/export options make collaboration easier by letting scientists share their workspaces with other SciFinder users.

This update follows the progression of enhancements to SciFinder. In December 2011, CAS added substance relevance ranking and bioactivity and target indicator features to help chemists and biologists quickly access the information they need most. In February 2012, one-click access to commercial chemical source pricing and availability information enabled scientists to go directly from a substance search to a purchasing decision at the supplier’s site. Just 2 months later, SciFinder debuted features that included searching of substance properties, converting CAS Registry Numbers to structures, and previewing substance and reference answer sets with the in-context Quick View window.

CAS also announced that SciFinder will be updated with nearly 200,000 additional experimental NMR spectra. These experimental data will help scientists better characterize and identify substances.

Source: Chemical Abstracts Service