Apple enters the E-textbook market

While this is initially targeted to the high school market, there are obvious implications and potential for Higher Education.

NEW YORK—January 19, 2012—Apple® today announced iBooks® 2 for iPad®, featuring iBooks textbooks, an entirely new kind of textbook that’s dynamic, engaging and truly interactive. iBooks textbooks offer iPad users gorgeous, fullscreen textbooks with interactive animations, diagrams, photos, videos, unrivaled navigation and much more. [...]Leading education services companies including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson will deliver educational titles on the iBookstore℠ with most priced at $14.99 or less [...].

Read the full press release

from Apple site.

For reactions to the announcement (Chronicle of Highed Ed. article.)

Can Tweets Predict Citations?

Interesting article in the Journal of Medical Internet Research:
Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact

The author, Gunther Eysenbach , concludes: 

Tweets can predict highly cited articles within the first 3 days of article publication. Social media activity either increases citations or reflects the underlying qualities of the article that also predict citations, but the true use of these metrics is to measure the distinct concept of social impact. Social impact measures based on tweets are proposed to complement traditional citation metrics. The proposed twimpact factor may be a useful and timely metric to measure uptake of research findings and to filter research findings resonating with the public in real time.'

 

Twitter for Academics, a 'how to' guide from LSE

Can anything of academic value ever be said in just 140 characters?

The LSE Public Policy Group and the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog seeks to answer this question, and show academics and researchers how to get the most out of the micro-blogging site. The Guide is designed to lead the novice through the basics of Twitter but also provide tips on how it can aid the teaching and research of the more experienced academic tweeter. [full press release]

Download the guide: Using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities

WRDS community

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WRDS is pleased to announce a new WRDS Community & WRDS Research Page

WRDS Community offers the global network of WRDS users a place to share ideas, collaborate, find colleagues with similar interests, link to their publications on SSRN and discuss upcoming research trends. It’s designed to be an interactive knowledge exchange where you can share expertise, network with other top-level financial data researchers and learn from peers.

Rent an Article!

Cambridge Journals has announced an article rental offer providing "Low-cost access to peer-reviewed research papers from leading academic journals"

Article Rental is open to anyone, anywhere in the world no subscription to any Cambridge title is required.

After registering on the site users may purchase articles online for just €4.49, $5.99 or £3.99 for a 24h access only. The PDF files cannot be downloaded, printed, or cut-and-pasted.

Where all the money is - a visualization

Click on the picture below to zoom.



Sources.

Google Scholar Citations open to all!

Use Google Scholar Citation to

• Track citations to your publications 
• View publications by colleagues 
• Appear in Google Scholar search results

From the announcement:

Here’s how it works. You can quickly identify which articles are yours, by selecting one or more groups of articles that are computed statistically. Then, we collect citations to your articles, graph them over time, and compute your citation metrics - the widely used h-index; the i-10 index, which is simply the number of articles with at least ten citations; and, of course, the total number of citations to your articles. Each metric is computed over all citations and also over citations in articles published in the last five years.

You will need to login with a Google account, by default your profile is private but you can decide to make it public.

Get started here  

Citing datasets, a How To guide

Researchers from the Digital Curation Center have posted a How To Guide:
How to Cite Datasets and Link to Publications

Book Citation Index is released

The book citation index has been launched as part of the Web of Knowledge

It covers 25,000 books in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities dating back to 2005.

13.5 million additional cited references will appear inWeb of Knowledge as a result of this launch.  

Coverage is expected to rise to 30,000 books by the end of 2011, with 10,000 new books added each year.

What's in it?

• The Book Citation Index will cover only scholarly books that present fully referenced articles of original research, or reviews of the literature. 
• The Book Citation Index will cover both series and non-series books.
• The Science Edition of the Book Citation Index will include books with copyright from the current or previous five (5) years (e.g. 2010-2005)
• The Social Science & Humanities Edition of the Book Citation Index will include books with copyright from the current or previous seven (7) years.

For a full explanation of the selection process click here.
For the Master Book List and a list of publishers covered click here.

For the press release click here.

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

From the Apple website:

Wall Street Journal tribute