Tuesday, September 28, 2010

New Table of Contents alerting service

I am posting here the full text of Choice Reviews Online's evaluation of a new cross-publisher TOC service:
"Journal TOCs, from the Institute for Computer Based Learning, Heriot-Watt University, Scotland.

http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/index.php

[Visited Jul'10] Journal TOCs makes viewing tables of contents from scholarly journals easy. One of many projects from Heriot-Watt's Institute for Computer Based Learning, this resource features the table of contents (TOCs) for over 14,000 journals from more than 500 publishers, with more being added continuously. JournalTOCs features TOCs from publishers such as Elsevier, SAGE, Oxford University Press, Wiley, Springer-Verlag, and the American Psychological Association. Users may search by journal title/ISSN, or look for articles via keywords. Alternatively, browsing by Publishers or by Subjects is available. Subjects range from Ceramics, Glass and Pottery to Library and Information Sciences. Not all scholarly titles in a particular field are included. Some 70 titles are listed in the library category, e.g., Library Hi Tech News, D-Lib Magazine, Community and Junior College Libraries, and Journal of Religious & Theological Information. Others, such as Journal of Academic Librarianship, College & Research Libraries, and Portal, are not included. In a quick comparison of results from a literature review using ABI/INFORM (CH, Sep'06, 44-0039), this reviewer found less than one-fourth of the ABI/INFORM journal titles listed in JournalTOCs. Granted, ABI/INFORM has many non-scholarly titles, but missing were refereed titles, as identified by Ulrich's (CH, Feb'03, 40-3121) such as The Journal of Information Systems Education and EDUCAUSE Review. Additional publishers are being included in JournalTOCs at a surprisingly fast rate, which will make this resource very valuable indeed. The developers have added many handy features including an application programming interface (API) to allow users to embed journal TOC functionality within a Web page. Additionally, MyTOCs, an RSS feed, and RefWorks software features are available, along with a project blog, at http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/API/blog/. This practical, significant Web site will soon be an indispensable tool for students, faculty, and researchers. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general audience. -- K. Condic, Oakland University"

1 comment:

zomba said...

JournalTOCs now has an email alerting feature. See http://roddymacleod.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/new-alerts-feature-for-journaltocs-the-free-tables-of-contents-service-for-thousands-of-scholarly-journals/ for more details.