Citations and referencing for new students

I gave a session for one of the other librarians recently for first year students in GSSSP. Its good to do this because it gives you an insight into the techniques and approaches of other librarians. The session involved handing out the components of a citation on cards and getting students to come to the front and construct various citations on a whiteboard. These included citations to books, books with more than one author, edited books, journal articles, journal articles from a databases, newspaper articles and wesbites. I think it went well and idea well worth borrowing for students in education.

Reading citations and referencing in APA or Harvard finds its way into quite a few of my sessions. The first years are asked to identify APA citations, have a go at looking them up in the catalogue and report back to the group on what they find. The Foundation studies students need to be able to identify the different components of a website and then put them into Harvard. Recently I have found that with the Grad dips it is very useful to get them to understand the different parts of a journal citation before we even have a look at the databases. It sometimes surprises me that even postgrads in Endnote classes struggle a little with citations.

This is just one small but important part of helping scholars become information literate. We like to think it is well worth lecturers and teachers giving some consideration to embedding sessions that teach these types of knowledge and skill into the structure of their programs.

Shaun Tan speaking at RMIT Bundoora Library

The Library and the School of Education have organised an annual children’s author visit for quite a few years now. It is generally organised to coordinate with one the School courses but is open to all RMIT staff and students who are interested. In past years we have had Doug MacLeod, Morris Gleitzman, Leigh Hobbs and Carole Wilkinson.

We are delighted to announce that Shaun Tan will speak to students in 2008. As the Scholastic website tells us:

Shaun Tan Shaun began drawing and painting images for science fiction and horror stories in small-press magazines as a teenager, and has since then, received numerous awards for his picture books, including the CBCA (Children’s Book Council of Australia) Picture Book of the Year Award for The Rabbits with John Marsden. … One of his latest projects is The Arrival, a wordless graphic novel that tells its story through the use of mesmerizing images.

You can find more information about Shaun Tan and his works on the AustLit database or from his website.

Shaun Tan will speak to School of Education students on aspects of visual literacy. This will take place at:

RMIT Bundoora Library, level one
Friday 8th August
11.30am-12.30pm

All welcome!

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Taylor & Francis announces improvement in citation ranking

Taylor & Francis has just issued a press release on an improvement in the overall ranking of their journals in ISI Journal Citation Reports. As they say

The impressive growth of Taylor & Francis Group journals is reflected in an 11% increase in total citations to titles listed in both 2006 and 2007 compared to a 9% growth in citations across all titles in the JCRs.

The usual way of accessing particular journal titles is via a catalogue search and the “find it” link at the catalgue record. However, I thought I would just mention that we access to Taylor & Francis journals via Informaworld and titles include:

• Cambridge Journal of Education
• Critical Studies in Education
• Early Years
• Education 3-13
• Educational Research
• Educational Research and Evaluation
• Educational Review
• Educational Studies
• Globalisation, Societies and Education
• Higher Education Research & Development
• International Journal of Early Years Education
• International Journal of Lifelong Education
• Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education
• Journal of Education for Teaching
• Journal of Vocational Education & Training
• Leadership and Policy in Schools
• Oxford Review of Education
• Research in Post-Compulsory Education
• School Leadership & Management
• Teaching Education
• The New Educator

Citation as a measure of impact

Just following on from my previous post…

Staff within the School have become increasingly interested in products that allow you to examine citation counts as a measure of impact, particularly when applying for promotion.  The Library has a Research Quality and Publications page giving advice and providing links to the most relevant products that can help with this kind of analysis.

The coverage of Australian and specifically education material is quite sketchy, but hopefully this will improve in the future.  As I mentioned previously, the key resources are ISI’s Web of Science, which allows you to search specific articles and the number of others citing it, and Journal Citation Reports, which rank the impact of journals in the different fields. In addition to this, we are also able to search citation information in products such as CSA’s social science databases. Google Scholar has proved quite useful also with the “cited by” links it is providing within its results.

Sometimes staff are also interested in the number of library holdings for their books and we can certainly do this kind of search. There is another quite impressive (US) product called Worldcat Identities that will automatically generate an author page with links to library holdings for their works. Here is the entry for Heather F.

I will mention finally that an academic at the University of Melbourne has developed a piece of freeware called Publish or Perish that crunches the information found on Google Scholar.

ERA and journal rankings

The Australian Research Council last month released its draft list of journals that will form an important part of the new Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) and its “discipline-specific tiered outlet rankings”. As an article in The Australian last month explained:

 When the list is finalised, after a consultation period it will be used to show the percentage of a university’s research papers that appear in the top 5 per cent or A-star tier, next 15 per cent or tier A, following 30 per cent or tier B and bottom 50 per cent or tier C.

It is probable that they are partly drawing on key resources such as ISI’s Web of Science, which allows you to search specific articles and the number of others citing it, and Journal Citation Reports, which rank the impact of journals in the different fields. Scopus is another product commonly used for citation information but RMIT Library does not have a subcription to this currently.

UPDATE:  The Research and Innovation Portfolio is coordinating a response on behalf of RMIT. RMIT Schools now have until the Thusday 7th August 2008 to submit feedback on the draft Journal rankings. More information, the journal list for education and contact details are available here.

Review of Higher Education

Here’s the latest reporting on the Bradley paper from Google News. Don’t forget you can also search news sources, including those not available freely over the internet, via our Factiva database.

The paper can be found online and I will have it catalogued and a link made available from the catalogue entry.

2b or not 2b?

David Crystal on texting and literacy in the latest Guardian:

An extraordinary number of doom-laden prophecies have been made about the supposed linguistic evils unleashed by texting. Sadly, its creative potential has been virtually ignored. But five years of research has at last begun to dispel the myths. The most important finding is that texting does not erode children’s ability to read and write. On the contrary, literacy improves. The latest studies (from a team at Coventry University) have found strong positive links between the use of text language and the skills underlying success in standard English in pre-teenage children. The more abbreviations in their messages, the higher they scored on tests of reading and vocabulary. The children who were better at spelling and writing used the most textisms. And the younger they received their first phone, the higher their scores.

Children could not be good at texting if they had not already developed considerable literacy awareness. Before you can write and play with abbreviated forms, you need to have a sense of how the sounds of your language relate to the letters. You need to know that there are such things as alternative spellings. If you are aware that your texting behaviour is different, you must have already intuited that there is such a thing as a standard. If you are using such abbreviations as lol and brb (“be right back”), you must have developed a sensitivity to the communicative needs of your textees.

Endnote sessions

This is a reminder that I’m giving Endnote sessions next week open to staff and students in the School of Education. These will be held at both Bundoora and Swanston libraries. By the end of the session participants should be able to:

• Create Endnote libraries and manually input references
• Insert references into word documents
• Use Library catalogues and databases to build Endnote libraries

 

Date	Place	Time
Wed 9th Jul	Bundoora Library Seminar Rm Three	4.00-5.30pm
Thu 10th Jul	Swanston Library Seminar Rm Two	10.00-11.30am

Email me to book a place.