Health News Review
From What We Do:

What news stories are reviewed?
HealthNewsReview.org reviews news stories that make a therapeutic claim about:

• Specific treatments
• Procedures
• Investigational drugs or devices
• Vitamins or nutritional supplements
• Diagnostic and screening tests

Who conducts the reviews?
A multi-disciplinary team of reviewers from journalism, medicine, health services research and public health assesses the quality of the stories using a standardized rating system. Stories are graded and critiques are published on this website.

+ Things You Should Know About Medical Research Stories
+ Tools and Links

Dr. Peter Jacso writes:

This database has been the first to put the humans in the center of country statistics through the introduction of the human development index (HDI). Later, it added the Gender-specific Development Index (GDI), the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), and the Human Poverty Index to the yearly Human Development Reports. These measures and the index values are controversial (as most of such indices, and especially, composite measures are). They represent good starting points to gauge human development, and gender inequities in countries around the world —except for the human poverty measures which put, for example Singapore and the Occupied Palestinian Territory almost cheek-to-cheek. In addition to celebrating women’s history month through speeches, biographies, and articles, this factographic database should get more attention, support and funding to inform better about the gross inequities of women in many countries.

Direct to Full Review

Source: Gale.com

Sorting Out Life’s Little Complexities With Bento Personal Database
From the review:

Bento is made by FileMaker, which is a subsidiary of Apple. It’s the company that makes the business-class FileMaker Pro database. Bento is designed to help you organize a variety of non-structured data, including contacts, calendar events, projects, tasks, photos and media — just about anything you can think of. Entering data is easy and intuitive, but the trick isn’t so much understanding how to drag-and-drop your content, how to import data and make hyperlinks. The key to unlocking the enigma of Bento is figuring out how you can make it work for you — personally.

Direct to Bento (Mac OS X Leopard Only)

Source: TechNewsWorld

Web Resource Review by Jacso: Visual Dictionary Online

Dr. Peter Jacso reviews the Visual Dictionary Online. Here’s the summary:

The Visual Dictionary Online is an almost perfect general dictionary created by the fusion of parts of a splendid picture dictionary with few words and text definitions by a group of top-notch lexicographers. It has some unevenness in the coverage of objects and concepts, an irritating oversight in the religion section and a few illustrations that are less than contemporary, but overall it is an outstanding, free Web resource in the sub-genre among the many free online dictionaries.

Source: Gale

ResourceShelf first posted about this dictionary in November when it debuted online.

Dr. J. reviews what Amazon.com is up to in terms of music downloads (cost, DRM, etc.) and compares it to what’s available from iTunes, emusic, Napster, Yahoo Music Unlimited, Rhapsody and others. He also notes in the opening paragraph that their are probably, “ten times as many —arguably— illegal sites.” He summarizes his review with the following:

Amazon MP3 download store offers 3 million legal, unprotected, high-quality tracks for 89¢-99¢ a piece, and albums from $6 to $11, directly in MP3 format. All these are yours to play and burn without the usual limitations imposed by Digital Rights Management software, and without any membership fees. However, the search module needs to be improved.

Source: Gale.com

Reference Reviews: Jacso Reviews Scopus
This is Dr. Jacso’s second review of Scopus. He writes:

Significant gaps were filled in Scopus since I last reviewed it, and many journals were added. Some substantial gaps still remain. Given the software’s trademark fusion of the smooth elegance of ballroom dancing and the power and dynamism of raw flamenco dancing by the late Antonio Gades and his “bailaores,” it is not surprising, that there are many spiffy software features that I enjoy (and one that I consider to be a faux pas—literally and figuratively).

Jacso also has several comments about Google Scholar in the review.

and…
oops, we missed the following review:

Encyclopedia of Terrorism

This is another open access gem in the digital reference collection of the Terrorism Information Center of the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT). It is a licensed version of the digital edition by Gale of the print encyclopedia of Sage Publications. Considering daily events of terrorism, it is somewhat dated as are most of the related encyclopedias on the topic, but it perfectly complements the other resources developed by MIPT or licensed by MIPT for free worldwide access. It provides excellent background for putting into perspective the contemporary acts of terrorism, if not the mindset of their perpetrators.

Source: Gale.com

Review: Proquest History Study Center (PDF; 170 KB)

History Study Center Review Scores Composite: *** 7/8

The maximum number of stars in each category is 5.

Content: **** HSC’s strength is the richness, depth, and diversity of its content. It is not rated a “5″ (highest) because it does slant towards British and North American content; though, since it’s from Chadwyck-Healey, one could hardly expect otherwise. Additional earlier journal content would further enrich the product. HSC includes some video, image, and audio content, but it could be improved with more multimedia as well. Web links are excellent.

Searchability: **** Most users will find the Basic and Advanced (including Boolean) search functions easy and intuitive to use. The search Help files are good but could be improved and updated.

Pricing Options: *** 1/2 Though flexible pricing is available, and $6K for a small academic library sounds reasonable, the pricing model seems higher than it should be given that most of the content is preexisting and previously published. Customers are not notified of updates as they occur, which makes the product seem more static than it really is. Offering consortia pricing is a plus.

Contract Options: ****

Source: The Charleston Advisor (via author, DrWeb)

Customer Feedback Central: 100 Places to Find Reviews for Every Product

Whether you’re preparing to buy a car, a computer, or even a new toy for your child, it’s important to conduct some background checks and do your research on the product beforehand. Gas mileage, recalls and reliability are just a few issues to consider. Where can you find that sort of information? Below is a large list of sites that offer real customer feedback on practically every product out there.

Source: Inside CRM

In his latest post, Dr. Peter Jacso reviews SpringerLink. Review summary by Jacso:

Springer (after acquiring Kluwer Academic) has become the second largest publisher of scientific, technical and medical journals, and has done an impressive job in digitizing the back issues of most of Springer and Kluwer journals back to their first issue. Its software —provided by Metapress which recently came out of a long period of inertia with this nifty release— is exemplary in many regards, and has only a few deficiencies.

SpringerLink is the flagship application among the Metapress clients, and also among the digital collections of the most avant guard publishers. It is to be noted that SpringerLink makes good use of the ever-increasing CrossRef database to inform the users (even the non-subscribers) how many times a paper was cited in journals published by CrossRef members. It is not as sophisticated as the use of CrossRef for the same purpose in the splendid PROLA archive of the American Physical Society, but it is an important example for other publishers that will also use CrossRef to offer search options based on cited and citing references.

See Also: In July, Jacso reviewed TranStats (transportation statistics) and ResourceShelf favorite, FlightStats (real-time flight info).

See Also: FlightAware (We Find that Both Flight Aware and FlightStats Worthy of Your Attention)
Remember, this info comes from directly from the FAA and airlines.

See Also: FlightStats Now Has a Mobile Version
Go to http://mobile.flightstats.com

New Review: Jacso Shares Comments on the dLIST Depository
Reference guru Dr. Péter Jacso from the University of Hawaii is back with a look at dLIST, a resource we visit often as we compile ResourceShelf and DocuTicker each day.

The Summary Reads:

The dLIST depository is one of the two, relatively small digital preprint/reprint collections dedicated to library and information science & technology. It has documents in a variety of formats (DOC, PPT, HTML) from prominent sources by prominent authors with an unusually large choice of access points. Unfortunately, full-text searching is not one of the search options in this otherwise worthy depository.

Source: Péter’s Digital Reference Shelf (via Gale.com)

Quick Note from Gary: The ResourceShelf team is thrilled to be listed and linked near the top of the dLIST home page as a site to visit for news and info. Thanks to the dLIST team for including us. To be listed alongside the likes of Dr. Peter Suber and Charles W. Bailey is very exciting.

Internet Resource Reviews from C&RL News
The following resources are reviewed:
+ British History Online
+ Center for Democracy & Technology
+ First Amendment Center

Source: C&RL News

Reference Resource Reviews: Peter Jacso on American Reference Books Annual (ARBA)
Jacso writes:

This popular resource of nearly 17,000 reviews of ready-reference publications has been enhanced by a swift and smart software, and offers an excellent tool not only for acquisitions and reference librarians to know which ready-references sources may complement their existing collection, but also for end-users to find out which encyclopedias, dictionaries, almanacs, atlases, biographies, bibliographies yearbooks, directories and handbooks may be the most appropriate for looking up a fact.

Source: Gale.com

In his first review for February 2007, Dr. Peter Jacso from the University of Hawaii looks at CSA Illustrata.

He writes:

CSA of the Cambridge Information Group rung in the new year with the release of CSA Illustrata, an innovative, leading edge database of more than 165,000 traditional indexing/abstracting records plus close to one million richly indexed illustrations extracted from scientific journal articles published in the past 10 years. CSA established itself in the early 1970s as an indexing/abstracting service, and now is bent on revitalizing and revolutionizing the indexing/abstracting database genre. One may argue exactly how many words a picture (chart, table, graph, map, photo, etc.) is worth, but my in-depth testing of the pre-release version of CSA Illustrata showed that an image can be worth much more than a thousand words as they can significantly improve the precision/pertinence of the scholarly information retrieval process.

Source: Gale.com

Peter Jacso Posts Second Gale.com Review for Janaury: Blackwell-Synergy

Dr. Peter Jacso from the Uniersity of Hawaii writes:

Blackwell’s digital collection includes more than 1 million articles from nearly 900 journals. The bibliographic records and abstracts are open access; the full-text documents are available for subscribers in a variety of pricing options. More than 60% of Blackwell’s journals are covered both by Web of Science and Scopus, indicating the importance of the Blackwell’s titles. The new user interface has a cleaner design with new features, but it still leaves room for further refinements. Even if your library subscribes to the digital full-text of only some of the Blackwell titles, the possibility to search for free the bibliographic data, the abstracts and the full text of all the digitized articles in this genuinely multidisciplinary collection can make it an important tool on a digital reference shelf.

See Also: Jacso’s First Review for 2007 was an in-depth look at Web of Science

Citation Indexing Review: Péter Jacsó Reviews Web of Science

Péter writes:

This granddaddy of citation indexes has kept adding new content and software features through regular updates, and now has reached a very important milestone. The clustering of results set by eight criteria; the instant calculation and superbly informative and compact visualization of new citation measures, such as the sum of times a paper was cited; the insta-charts showing the contour of publishing productivity and citedness pattern of the chosen entities (authors, journals, organizations, topics) across time; and the exporting of these details into a spreadsheet and/or to the free version of the Web-based Endnote software represents more than a series of evolutionary steps.

The last time Jacsó reviewed Web of Science was two years ago. Here’s a link to that review.

Source: Gale.com