Searching Your Symptoms: Three Things You Should Know

We all search our symptoms. We want to understand what's happening to our health and figure out what the next steps are. Rest and fluids? A trip to the doctor's office? There's lots of debate on the implications of this common practice, so I've singled out three things that the literature tells us to be …

Rewarding Open Access – Nominations for the Accelerating Science Award Program

A new award, with major sponsorship from Google, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and the Wellcome Trust, seeks to reward pioneers for the social good byawarding $30,000 to three people who have "applied scientific research published through open access" - in ANY field - for the benefit of society. The official award site is …

Google Lecture Series: Victor Stecher on new directions in health informatics

When: (tomorrow) Friday, March 29th, 2013 from 3:30-5 pm Where: Due to the North Quad flood, this lecture has been moved to Space 2435 (...also in North Quad). 3100 North Quad - Ehrlicher Room (see this post for more detailed directions to finding the Ehrlicher Room) Join Victor Strecher (my 2 cents: a truly phenomenal …

The Internet Reacts: Hathi Trust vs. the Author’s Guild

I was pleasantly surprised last week to see an email that the judge in the Author's Guild case against several universities (U of M and the Hathi Trust included) had ruled, quite in favor of our efforts, it seems. Since then there has been a flurry of activity on Twitter (check out @HathiTrust and #AGvHT), …

The Gloves Come Off: Google Scholar vs. PubMed

An interesting article has been making the rounds of health library listservs. Comparing search results from PubMed and Google Scholar based on 4 clinical questions, the authors (from Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and Carnegie Mellon University) conclude: "PubMed searches and Google Scholar searches often identify different articles. In this study, Google Scholar articles were …

Google Power Searcher Online Course

Tomorrow (July 10, 2012) Google launches an online seminar, Power Searching with Google. Billed as "a short course on becoming a great internet searcher," this massive open online course (or MOOC, a la Stanford/UM fame with Coursera) promises to give you the "many more tips, tricks and tactics you can use to find exactly what you’re …

A New Service to the Google Scholar Family

In spite of the April 1st announcement date, it's no April Fool's joke – Google is indeed adding a ranking service to Google Scholar. Dubbed Google Scholar Metrics, think of it as the “scholarly” version of Page Rank, only instead of measuring popularity through links, Google Scholar Metrics will use citations. In Google Scholar’s blog …

Learn about Google’s Upcoming Research Computing Tools April 26

Reposted from the Office of Research CyberInfrastructure News and Events: Google’s Manager for Computational Discovery for Science, Joe Hellerstein, will discuss their upcoming resources for computational research on April 26, 2012, at 2:00 at Chesebrough Auditorium in the Chrysler Center. Products soon to be released to U-M researchers include: massive computing and storage capabilities services to make powerful research tools both more …