NJIT Library Holiday Party

Today most of the NJIT Library drove out to the Manor in West Orange for our annual holiday party. We had been there in the past for several retirement luncheons, but this was outr first holiday party there. In some years, we had the party in the library conference room, while other years we went to local restaurants. The food was excellent, while everyone enjoyed themselves. It was nice to get away from the office for a few hours.

Passing of Val Metanomski

I was informed today of the passing of Val Metanomski of Chemical Abstracts Service. I had the pleasure of knowing Val through the American Chemical Society Division of Chemical Information. He was always very friendly to me when we met at national meeting of the society. As the archivist of the division he wrote "50 years of Chemical Information in the American Chemical Society 1943-1993". This volume documents my activities in the Division as a committee chair and a symposium organizer before 1993. Val will certainly be missed by all his professional colleagues. My condolences to the family.

A Celebration of the Life of Professor Dana Knox

In my journal entry of September 24, 2008 I reported the untimely passing of Dana Knox, Associate Provost and Professor of Chemical Engineering at NJIT. Today there was a celebration of his life at the Campus Center Atrium. There were moving speeches by Reginald Tomkins, Reobert Altenkirch, Priscilla Nelson, Joel Bloom, Rose Federici, Isabel Bracero, Robert Barat, Lisa Kardos, Kathy Kelly, David Ullman, Richard Sweeney, and John Federici.

We just created an area for the collection of Dana's chemical engineering books that were donated to the library. There is also a plaque that will be mounted in the library at a future date to recall his contributions to the university.

Reference Question of the Day

A student needed two papers discussing metabolism of anti-cancer drugs. We tried both Scifinder Scholar and Scopus using the search strategy drug metabolism and antineoplastic. We found references in both databases. The problem was finding articles that we had access at NJIT.

H Index - the hot topic of the week

This week I have received questions from 3 faculty about the H index, a concept that was first postulated in 2005 as a way of measuring the impact of a scientist through his/her publications. There is a good article in the Wikipedia that summarizes the H index. I was able to find the H index for these 3 professors using Scopus and the Web of Science. The latter gave a higher value since it covers older publications.

NJIT lost to St. Johns 82-54 in basketball

From 1990-92 I worked at the library at St. John's University in Queens. Just now St. John's beat NJIT 82-54 in men's basketball. I just heard part of the game on WBBR radio. The NJIT Highlanders have now lost 41 games in a row. I will not offer an opinion here. I am just stating the facts.

Cited References Searches for Faculty

The library is asked to do cited reference searches for faculty members applying for promotion or tenure. The number of cited references is an indication of how one researcher's work impacts on others in their respective specialty. There is an assumption that more cited references are a better gauge of the quality of the research. This maybe true, but there are certain some caveats. For example in the 1980s Fleischman and Pons wrote a paper on cold fusion, but their theory was really shot down. In this case a high number of cited references did not indicate quality. There could also be a controversial paper that receives many cited references from people expressing opinions on both sides of the issue. For example touch therapy in nursing is debatable, and a paper on that topic would yield researchers supporting both sides of the issue.

We search Scopus and the Web of Science to determine the number of cited references for each candidate. We also search Scifinder Scholar if the specialty is in a chemical related area. Since each of these databases has different journal coverage, we report the highest number. We do not use Google Scholar since that database included non-refereed papers. Some people fight tooth and nail for every cited reference they can get.

The Promotion and Tenure committee obviously uses many factors when evaluating candidates. They look at the quality of the journals which are often determined through the impact factor. There is always the "political factor."