MIT Libraries News

Scanning tunneling microscope image shows an artificial atomic nucleus on graphene. Courtesy of Michael Crommie

A team of researchers from MIT and other institutions have shown atomic collapse, a phenomenon predicted decades ago but never before observed. The researchers, including physics professor Leonid Levitov, devised a new technique to simulate atomic nuclei on the surface of graphene, which is a sheet of densely packed carbon atoms. Using graphene made it possible to manipulate and observe the nuclei, in part because they move slower. They report their findings in an upcoming article in the journal Science.

Explore Professor Levitov’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

Start cultivating a garden of knowledge with MIT Libraries’ research guides. Our guides dig deeper than Google to uncover the best sources for information on your research topic. Each guide contains lists of resources recommended by expert librarians. Suggestions for print and electronic resources, databases, and journals—it’s all there!

• Researching soil chemistry properties in the scholarly literature? What database does the Chemistry guide suggest?

• Not sure what the first settlers in Massachusetts grew in their gardens? Try the Historical Newspapers guide.

• Want to do market research on produce? Have you seen the Do-It-Yourself Market Research guide?

We even have guides about organizing your references, managing your data, getting published, and so much more! Seriously, think of a topic – any topic. Yep, we probably have that, too.

And you’re always welcome to ask us for help!

Erik Demaine, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, has won the 2013 European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) Presburger Award for young scientists. The committee, which unanimously chose Demaine, cited his “outstanding contributions in several fields of algorithms, namely computational geometry, data structures, graph algorithms and recreational algorithms.” EATCS also noted his work in computational origami. Demaine and his father have created pieces that are part of New York’s Museum of Modern Art permanent collection.

Explore Professor Demaine’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

Did you know the MIT Libraries has a vast storehouse of technical literature NOT in Barton, but easily accessible right here on campus? Recently our librarians have demystified this very important world: http://libguides.mit.edu/techreports.

Thousands of research reports from national and international labs and other universities or contracting companies were sent to MIT and are kept in our Annex. The collection is particularly strong in energy, including the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and all its successor agencies (ERDA, DOE).  The research guide will help you find them. And because they are often the sources behind published journal articles or conference papers, they can provide fuller accounts of the research, including designs, experimental details or other practical information.

Bottom line?  As more literature gets digitized, more citations to technical reports are discovered. Dive into this world yourself, or Ask Us!

Doing quantitative research?  Need statistics for a research project, paper, or to provide context for a project?  Looking for a needle-in-a-haystack?  Try these new statistical databases from the Libraries!

Statista provides statistics on a wide range of topics, including industries, markets, demography, countries & economies.  It harvests data from market researchers, trade associations, scientific publications, and government sources, and compiles it in a central place for you to search.  Download data in tabular or graphical form and link to original data sources and related reports.  Find statistics such as:

• Global market share held by the leading smartphone operating systems in sales to end users from 1st quarter 2009 to 4th quarter 2012
• Percentage of U.S. population who has (or ever had) cancer, 1999-2011, by age
• U.S. organic food sales growth forecast from 2010 to 2014
• Monthly unemployment rate in the U.S. from January 2012 to January 2013 (seasonally-adjusted)
• and more…

Access Statista at: http://libraries.mit.edu/get/statista.

Researching local areas in the United States?  Govistics provides spending, revenue, employment and crime data for state and local governments and school districts across the U.S., pulling together data from different sources.  Find data such as the following for the City of Cambridge:

• Government spending and number of employees in all areas, including social services, education, and public safety
• Number of violent and property crimes
• Investment portfolio of the city’s retirement system, with data on membership and contributions
• and more…

Access Govistics at: http://libraries.mit.edu/get/govistics.

Need data on your research topic but have no idea who collects it?  Try the Statistical Abstract of the United States!  This online reference source provides summary statistical tables of everything under the sun, and detailed citations to the original source for you to find more detailed data.  Search not only by subject but also filter your results to those available at certain demographic (e.g., age, sex, race, education, marital status), geographic (e.g., state, smsa), and economic (e.g., industry, occupation) breakdowns.  Find data such as:

• Nonfatal occupational injury and illness cases in private industry by type of injury or illness and days away from work: 2010
• Coastline counties most frequently hit by hurricanes: 1960 To 2008
• Municipal solid waste generation, materials recovery, combustion with energy recovery, and discards: 1980 to 2010
• Research and development expenditures in science and engineering at universities and colleges: 2000 to 2010

Access the Statistical Abstract at: http://libraries.mit.edu/get/stat-abstract.

Want further information on statistics and data resources?  Try Social Science Data Services or other data resources listed on our subject-oriented research guides.

Scientists have known for two decades that Huntington’s disease, a fatal brain disorder, is caused by a mutant gene that’s expanded to include DNA repeats. But it’s not clear how the gene produces the disease symptoms. MIT biological engineers, including MIT grad student Christopher Ng and professors Ernest Fraenkel and David Housman, recently published a paper that comes closer to answering that question. They found that the protein encoded by the Huntington’s gene changes the chemical structure of genes involved in brain function. Disruptions to these genes could cause neurodegenerative symptoms.

Explore Professor Fraenkel’s research and Professor Housman’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

The MIT Libraries are pleased to announce campus wide access to DesalData.com, a business development and consultancy package from the publishers of Global Water Intelligence in association with the International Desalination Association (IDA).

Within Desal Data you will find desalination plant listings, incorporating the IDA Inventory (a catalogue of desalination facilities contracted and under construction since 1945, based on over 25 years of annual industry surveys), market analysis and economic forecasting from Global Water Intelligence, company profiles and desalination news from countries worldwide.

You can find DesalData in VERA or use this URL http://libraries.mit.edu/get/desaldata

We welcome your feedback and hope this product supports the desalination work on campus!

Researching energy industries?  Need statistics, market analysis, news, company information, and financial deals?  Try our suite of eTrack databases:

• Alternative Energy eTrack
• eTrack Nuclear
• eTrack Oil and Gas
• eTrack Smart Grid
• Petrochemicals eTrack
• Power eTrack

eTrack provides data and reports on energy industry sectors worldwide. Each database contains numerous statistical databases; detailed information on companies, deals, and key events; plus in-depth industry research.   Find detailed statistics and generate lists such as:

• Wind farms in Argentina (showing the generation capacity of each)
• Planned oil exploration blocks, showing the country, area, operator, and acreage
• Nuclear power reactors to be decommissioned (including shutdown year and decommissioning cost)

Note: To download tables, copy and paste them into Excel page by page.

Want further information about energy?  Attend one of our energy IAP workshops and try the other resources on our Energy Research Guide.

Two MIT researchers have won the country’s highest honors for scientists, engineers, and inventors. Sallie (Penny) Chisholm, a professor of environmental studies in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, won the National Medal of Science. Robert Langer, an Institute Professor and professor of chemical engineering, won the National Medal of Technology. President Barack Obama will present the awards at a ceremony early in 2013.

Explore Professor Chisholm’s research and Professor Langer’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

If you use Google Scholar, you already know it’s a great tool for finding citations to literature in your research area. It’s a massive index of articles, books and other publications of a scholarly nature. (It doesn’t cover ALL the scholarly literature in any discipline, however, so be sure to include the Libraries’ databases in Vera in your literature search.)

Many of the articles in Google Scholar are licensed by the MIT Libraries through our subscriptions, so – in many cases – the full text is available to you. If you are on campus, you’ll see this link in your results list:

Are you working off campus?   To take advantage of this feature, click on Settings and then Library Links.

Type MIT in the search window; select it; click Save.  You should now see the full text link in your results list for articles in any of MIT’s paid subscriptions.

Have you tried Scopus, one of our citation databases in Vera?  Scopus’ main focus is in the sciences but it also includes strong coverage of the social sciences.  Use Scopus to look for journal articles, conference papers and other materials.  Once you find relevant articles Scopus can link you to other related articles in the database and show you other articles (published since 1996) that have cited the article you are looking at.

To focus your Scopus search in the social sciences literature click the Social Science and Humanities button on the search screen:

Start searching Scopus now.

As a graduate student in Chemical Engineering, MIT’s Patrick Heider is very familiar with variables of time and pressure. And as this year’s winner of the Knovel University Challenge, Patrick will use his new iPad to optimize these just in time for the holidays.

Each year Knovel invites engineering students worldwide to enter a competition designed to show the content and powerful search functions of this collection of sci/tech handbooks. One example is Patrick’s favorite feature, the Equation Plotter. “[This] … is a great way to quickly get property information without having to dig through the text to figure out the functional form used for a specific correlation,” he writes. Users can also input names of properties and ranges of data values to search for compounds that fit these bounds. At your fingertips is a digital library that, thanks to the MIT Libraries, will bring you specific answers as well as full texts to use in coursework or research.

Where do you turn for a reliable snapshot or update of what’s happening on Capitol Hill or elsewhere in the world of energy? The MIT Libraries are pleased to announce the addition of Energywire to the family of products purchased from E & E Publishing: Greenwire, Climatewire, E & E Daily, Land Letter and more. Energywire now joins this group to summarize Congressional and other energy sector news.

The stories and headlines in Energywire can be searched by keyword or delivered to you through its alerting service. The top story in one recent alert highlighted MIT’s research on methane emissions and natural gas. Updates on oil shale, energy in the Arctic, geopolitics, water and energy, and business developments are all popular topics, along with many others.

As it says at the bottom of each daily alert, “Get all of the stories in today’s Energywire!”

Find it here: http://libraries.mit.edu/get/ew

Collier, A.J. 167. Williams coal mine 90 miles below Nulato, on Yukon River.

Two MIT School of Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences faculty members have won awards for their work. Economist Anna Mikusheva received the 2012 Elaine Bennett Research Prize from the American Economic Association. The prize honors outstanding women researchers at the beginning of their careers. Mikusheva, who has PhDs in both economics and mathematics, studies econometrics theory.

Anthropologist Stefan Helmreich has won the 2012 Rachel Carson Prize for his book Alien Ocean. The prize recognizes works of social or political relevance in science and technology. Helmreich’s book, which has won several awards, explores marine biologists’ study of microbes.

Explore Professor Mikusheva’s research and Professor Helmreich’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

Detailed computer simulation shows how a patch of nutrients gets distributed in turbulent water. Image courtesy of Roman Stocker and John Taylor

Scientists have long believed that ocean-dwelling microorganisms need not move to gather food because turbulence distributes nutrients uniformly. Using a computer model that simulates a turbulent sea, Civil and Environmental Engineering associate professor Roman Stocker and colleague John R. Taylor have shown that some bacteria swim for food and others don’t, and that there are advantages and disadvantages to both. The study, published in the journal Science last week, is the first to show how the ocean environment affects feeding strategy. “We’re working at the interface between microbiology and fluid dynamics,” Stocker told the MIT News.

Explore Professor Stocker’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world viaDSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

Scientists believe that global warming will lead to more intense rainfall around the world, but models have been at odds about the rate at which it will affect extreme precipitation in tropical regions. A new study by atmospheric science professor Paul O’Gorman uses observations and computer simulations to estimate that with each one-degree Celsius climb in temperature there will be 10 percent heavier rainfall extremes in the tropics. This “suggests a relatively high sensitivity of tropical precipitation extremes to global warming,” O’Gorman told the MIT News.

Explore Professor O’Gorman’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

Six years of global negotiation have paid off for the consortium that has a vision: to make the scholarly literature of high energy physics openly available to anyone in the world.

The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) has negotiated 3-year contracts with 12 journals “that would make 90% of high-energy-physics papers published from 2014 onwards free to read,” according to a report in Nature.

The SCOAP3 deal involves pledges of support from more than 1,000 libraries and other funders around the world, including the MIT libraries. Libraries’ payments will be used to pay the publishers an agreed-upon fee per paper, averaging $1550. In return, all 12 journals, including about 7,000 articles from journals such as the American Physical Society’s Physical Review C and D, Elsevier’s Physics Letters B and Nuclear Physics B, and Springer’s European Physical Journal C and Journal of High Energy Physics, will make their content openly accessible to all readers. Six of the journals will switch their business models from subscription to open access. For others, only the high-energy physics articles will be open access.

Salvatore Mele, the leader of the SCOAP3 project at CERN, the high-energy physics laboratory in Geneva, indicated to Nature that the goal of the project is “to open access without researchers noticing any effect on their grant funding or on the way they publish their papers.” Pledging libraries are expected to be able to repurpose funds that were being used for subscriptions to these journals to pay the SCOAP3 fees; publishers will reduce their subscription prices to reflect fees they will obtain through SCOAP3.

The details of those arrangements are expected to be worked out in late 2012 and into 2013. Only then will contracts actually be signed. Nevertheless, this week’s announcement of a list of journals with specific article processing charges takes the deal a significant step closer to the conclusion of what Peter Suber, philospher and a leader of the open access movement, has called “the most systematic attempt to convert all the journals in a given field to open access.”

More information:
Nature article
SCOAP3 website

It can be tough for doctors to predict which treatment will best improve the health of patients with social anxiety disorder, whose sufferers intensely fear social situations. A new paper coauthored by Brain and Cognitive Sciences professor John Gabrieli could help make doctors’ choice easier. In a paper published this month, researchers show that patients with more brain activity in visual processing areas benefited most from cognitive behavioral therapy. “This was a chance to ask if these brain measures, taken before treatment, would be informative in ways above and beyond what physicians can measure now,” Gabrieli told the MIT News.

Explore Professor Gabrieli’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

Assistant chemistry professor Mircea Dincă has been named one of Technology Review magazine’s 35 Innovators Under 35. Dincă was cited in the September/October issue for building intricate sponges that, though tiny, can store energy like hydrogen to more efficiently fuel a car. His group is also working on turning the sponges into materials to make batteries.

Explore Professor Dincă’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.