The US is ranked first in engineering

ScienceWatch reports that the rankings of the Top 20 Countries in Engineering, as determined by citation counts within Thompson-Reuters-indexed journals, have been released, and at present, the US is ranked number 1. In their words, the ranking lists "the top 20 countries which, as of the latest bimonthly update of Essential Science IndicatorsSM, attracted the highest total citations to their papers published in Thomson Reuters-indexed journals of Engineering over an 11-year period, (1998-December 31, 2008). These countries are of a pool of 96 countries comprising the top 50% ranked by total citation count in this field."

The full list:
1 USA
2 JAPAN
3 GERMANY
4 ENGLAND
5 PEOPLES REPUBLIC OF CHINA
6 FRANCE
7 CANADA
8 ITALY
9 TAIWAN
10 SOUTH KOREA
11 SPAIN
12 AUSTRALIA
13 NETHERLANDS
14 INDIA
15 SWITZERLAND
16 RUSSIA
17 SWEDEN
18 BELGIUM
19 SINGAPORE
20 TURKEY

News Tidbits

The Good:

• Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) has launched a free online database of 7,800 chemicals, called Common Chemistry. It is intended mostly for use by the general public, but may be of use to students and researchers at CMU, as well. Here is the press release.
• NSF is spending stimulus money. From the linked story, "The ARRA funds set aside for new solicitations will be divided equally between facility updgrades and lab instrumentation purchases. NSF will invest $200 million to fund repairs and renovations to existing academic research facilities. Projects will be awarded up to $10 million each and can include research spaces such as buildings, mobile research facilities, and virtual facilities that use broadband-based technologies to bring scientists together. The other $200 million will fund the purchase and development of shared-use instruments. Up to $6 million each will go to individual projects."

The Bad:

• The Global Positioning System (GPS) may deteriorate in the near future. Maybe Galileo will be here in time, or maybe not (by the way, here is an article discussing interoperability between the systems).

The Incredibly Beautiful:

• We thought we'd share some Hubble photos.

Happy National Library Week!

It's National Library Week at the Science Libraries--well, all over the nation, actually--and we thought we'd celebrate by making a new and different kind of display. You can't really tell from the photo, but it's a list of fun facts about the Engineering & Science Library, Mellon Institute Library, and the CMU Libraries in general.

It will be in the display case at E&S through the end of the semester, so stop by and have a look!

Got projects?

First of all, happy spring break! The library will be closed this weekend, then open all week, with slightly reduced hours. We return to normal schedule on Sunday the 15th.

Second, as we all know, when spring break is over, crunch time is on! If you are working on a research project--whether it's a class paper, a publication, or a dissertation--please feel free to contact us to set up an appointment. Or if you're teaching a class and would like us to come talk to your students about subject-specific resources and research strategies, you can also set up an appointment for that; Donna is going to talk to a class about researching for Unit Operations projects after spring break, and any of our information specialists would be happy to come to your class when you need us.

News tidbits

Have you heard about the Snackbot? Although it is still under development, soon--hopefully later this semester--it will soon be roaming campus, selling snacks to students. (And it's so cute!) Here are some links with more information:

• MAKE: Blog
• Slashfood
• The Robotics Institute

Also, a resource we really like and think you should be aware of: Purdue's Online Writing Lab. They do a really fantastic job of covering citation styles and even have an area of their site dedicated to engineering and technical writing, including Writing Engineering Reports and Writing Scientific Abstracts.

If you run into any news, resources, web sites, or information you think we should know about or would like to see posted to this blog, please feel free to leave it as a comment or send an e-mail to Donna Beck. We love hearing from you!