Volume 3 Issue 6 June 2011

Editor's Desk

Scholars Personal Information System

Scholars keep accessing, acquiring and accumulating enormous content in the form of full text documents, extracts, notes, quotes, references/ citations, data, observations, own reflections/ thoughts on several issues and problems relating to a number of specific topics of their interest. Such diverse set of content accumulated almost continuously used to be held, in olden days, on 6X4 ivory cards with references (called working bibliography) on 5X3 slips. And this aggregation is referred to as Personal Information System (PIS) and the Personal Bibliographic Database (PBD) formed integral part of PIS. Ideal PIS should ensure: easy and faster access to information held to intensify the use of available information re-use of information and prevent information once gained from being lost to avoid repetitive work improve organi-zation of knowledge and save cost and time in searching facilitate creative and more intensive utilization of accumulated information that in turn stimulates creative thinking and improved style of intellectual work of a scholar allow for linking of facts and ideas help discovering hither to unseen relations, associations and conclusions In the current Internet age, desk top search engines like Copernicus and Google enable quick searching of contents on ones desk top, but largely fail to meet other requirements like handling post-search processing of bibliographic data, i.e., PBD. On the other hand, Evernote, Webnotes and the like allow for adding notes/comments to documents and web pages and organize them with bookmarks, but again fail to handle PBD. During last 3-4 decades, more than 40 PIS tools like AskSam, Notebook II, Reference Manager, EndNote, Papyrus, Pro-cite, BibTeX, RefBase, Library Master are serving the scholars and researchers to handle PBD. Such tools are expected to provide for easy import of records from multitude of 1

databases, entering and editing of metadata of different kinds of material like journal articles, reports, books, etc. as well as allow for search, browse and maintain references, auto insertion of citations in word file, generating list of references for draft paper, reformatting citations and references in any popular styles like MLA, Chicago, APA, etc. Today, J-gate allows for downloading records (in full text view mode) to Endnote, Procite and Refworks all proprietary PIS tools. Through J-Gate2, we intend to provide a more user-friendly download and management of selected records from search results page itself not only to above proprietary tools but also to more popular open source tools like Mendeley in a standard format like RIS and BibTex. In this issue, we are bringing to you a step-by-step guide on how to access scholarly peer-reviewed articles, a technology-focus article on how search engines work and how to optimize them and of course, the usual tips for effective searching. We welcome your feedback.

M S Sridhar sridhar@informindia.co.in --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------http://informindia.co.in/iil_newsletterar.htm