Twitter (http://twitter.com), a popular micro-blogging client, allows for posts of up to 140 characters in length to be read online, from your phone or Blackberry.

The Research Medical Library’s Twitter account is @MDAndersonLib (www.twitter.com/MDAndersonLib). Please follow us to learn about the latest resources being added to our collection, building closures, upcoming classes, and other happenings in and around campus.  Some of our librarians are on Twitter along with other M.D. Anderson staff.

M.D. Anderson has these official Twitter accounts that you can follow too:

• @MDAndersonNews
• @CancerWise
• @FocusedOnHealth
• @PhysRelations
• @SprintforLife

If you have questions about Twitter or using other social media for research and collaborating, contact Librarian Shamsha Damani at sdamani@mdanderson.org or 713-563-8018.

New metrics to determine a journal’s impact have been added to the Journal Citation Reports database.  The well-known Impact Factor can be compared with the 5-Year Impact Factor, the Eigenfactor, and the Article Influence Score.  You can also rank journals by the new metrics.

All of the new metrics use a 5-year time span instead of the 2-year time span of the Impact Factor. The Eigenfactor ranks the influence of journals using a similar calculation as Google’s PageRank algorithm uses to rank the influence of web pages.  Journals are considered to be influential if they are cited often by other influential journals. The Eigenfactor includes in its calculation citations to other scholarly journals, as well as to newspapers, books, PhD theses, and popular magazines.

The Article Influence Score divides a journal's Eigenfactor Score by the fraction of articles published by the journal.  Scores are normalized so a score greater than 1.00 indicates that each article in the journal has above-average influence when compared to other Journal Citation Reports journals. A score less than 1.00 indicates that each article in the journal has below-average influence.

Using the Eigenfactor, the top 10 journals for Oncology in 2007 were:

• To learn more about the Eigenfactor: http://www.eigenfactor.org/methods.htm

• To view an interactive visualization of the Eigenfactor citation network: http://snipr.com/visualeigenfactor

• To search the Journal Citation Reports database, select the link under the Core Databases: http://www3.mdanderson.org/library/databases/databases.html

If you have any questions about finding Impact Factors or other metrics, please contact an expert searcher at: RML-Help@mdanderson.org or call 713-792-2282.

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