Dr. Zhong-Lin Lu’s talk

Dr. Lu is the director of  Laboratory of Brain ProcessES (LOBES) at the University of Southern California.

The second part of his presentation was about “applications of fMRI in understanding the neural mechanisms of attention”. His publications can be found at http://lobes.usc.edu/articles.htm, including full-text access to most reference he cited in this talk.

The best on-line abstracts & indexes to access articles in this fields are

• Web of Science
• PsycINFO
• BIOSIS
• MEDLINE

Explore Information Resources and Services at USC

First of all, I wanted to thank Prof. Lu and Lisa for helping me schedule this seminar to our department. How wonderful! Especial thanks went to Prof. R. Thompson who did research of my bio and introduced me to audience as if I were an very important person, which was such an honor!

I was impressed to see my seminar was well attended. Thank you all to be there! I was even glad that we had such a lively discussion about USC Libraries services and resources, which helped me know where to go and how to provide you services and resources.

Some concerns from audience in the seminars were

• proxy server should be more stable and much faster for users’ off campus access
• USC catalog records should be more accurate and complete
• Grand depository’s access is better than before, but still needs to be cleaned up in order to access many collection there

It was also good to know that

• physics and astronomy users are excited to know the Springer e-collection available at USC
• current journal e-subscription satisfies users’ needs at some degree
• many enjoy the back file access of Science Citation Index via WoS (yeah!)

last but not the least, I want to thank you all again! Please keep in mind that I am your librarian. Please do feel free to contact me for any questions, concerns and advice you might have.

Let’s build Norah’s ideal library together!

Opening up the black box called “Physical Review Letters”

Dr. Heijnsbergen, editor of PRL, came to USC and gave a presentation to help USC physics researchers and students understand in-depth of publishing issues within PRL.

Dr. Heijnsbergen began his seminar by collecting questions from audience. Prof. Johnson and many were very interested to know current acceptance rate of PRL, especially the number for domestic researchers. The other biggest concern from audience was the on-line submission system of PRL, which is not user-friendly according to some users’ experience.

During the presentation, Dr.  Heijnsbergen gave different statistical information to USC users, which answered the question 1. It showed that the acceptance rate for domestic researchers has not changed much, while due to faster research growth of other regions, especially researchers from Pacific Rim have been sumbitting a lot. User also questioned how PRL keep itself as pinnacle in the field, if there are more and more articles published. Dr. Heijnsbergen admitted that it was not easy for anyone. To help users know more about peer-review process of PRL, he then explained it to audience step by step, which was my first time to go through with an insider.

Overall it was a very informative presentation. As Dr. Heijnsbergen hoped that it can “culminate in a lively debate about the imminent changes in the landscape of scientific publishing”, I think he did it.

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Some background information:

• USC Libraries has the entire e-access to the APS publications.
• Physics highlights exceptional papers from the Physical Review journals. To accomplish this, Physics features expert commentaries written by active researchers who are asked to explain the results to physicists in other subfields. These commissioned articles are edited for clarity and readability across fields and are accompanied by explanatory illustrations.