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PBC Library

The NAU library website for the Phoenix Biomedical Campus Library

Research Support Services

 Research Support 

Your librarian can assist you throughout the entire life of a research project. An overview of services includes:

Citation Management | Literature Review Assistance | Copyright / Fair Use | Institutional Repository Support

To schedule a research consultation for these and other services, contact Mary Catherine Lockmiller via:

To learn more about the many different ways that impact can be measured, check out the following Metrics Toolkit: https://www.metrics-toolkit.org/.

 Statistics Consultation 

While PBC Library does not provide statistical consultation services, PBC students and employees can schedule distance-based appointments with the NAU Statistical Consultation Lab at the following link: https://nau.edu/math/statistical-consulting-lab/guide-to-statistical-consulting-lab/.

 Document Delivery 

In instances where NAU-PBC affiliates need to access materials which are not available in PBC Library or via NAU's e-resources, materials can be requested through Document Delivery Services.

DDS allows for the interlibrary loan of printed materials and full text journal articles that are not available electronically.

To initiate a DDS request, please visit http://library.nau.edu/services/dds.html.

For more information, call the Cline Library DDS Office at 928-523-6808.

 OpenKnowledge@NAU 

OpenKnowledge@NAU is NAU's Institutional Repository, where faculty and students provide access to their pedagogical work, research, and other creative output. Having access to an Institutional repository can 1) extend NAU's global impact; 2) help researchers meet funding requirements; 3) advance interdispiclinary and public collaboration; 4) promote long-term preservation and access; 5) promote the value of open access to information.

NAU PBC faculty and students can publish posters, scholarly writing, curricular design, art, books, datasets, and reports, among other  products! 

For information about OpenKnowledge@NAU, please contact catherine lockmiller at mary-catherine.lockmiller@nau.edu or Brittany Blanchard at brittany.blanchard@nau.edu.

 APA Resources 

 What is Zotero? 

Zotero is an open-source citation management platform. It includes a wealth of options to help make research easier. These include:

  • Format citations in over 9,000 different citation styles
  • Generate bibliographies, works cited pages, and reference pages for Word, Google Docs, and Open Office
  • Organize, edit, and de-duplicate citations using local software, mobile apps, and cloud storage
  • Browser extensions that capture and store citations without the need for manual input
To get started with Zotero, visit NAU's Zotero Resource Guide: https://libraryguides.nau.edu/zotero

 Understanding metrics 

Bibliometrics & altmetrics

It is becoming increasingly common to take bibliometrics and altmetrics into consideration when performing research and preparing for publication.

  • Bibliometrics: statistical measures of research impact based upon citations by author, article, and journal depending on the measure used.
  • Altmetrics: statistical measures of impact based upon views, links out, and shares across social media platforms.

Typically, bibliometrics will inform decisions to publish work in specific journals; they also function to give insight into the common usage of specific articles within a discipline or field of study, They also provide insight into emerging lines of inquiry and research. The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and H- score are the most common measures; however, Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) is growing in popularity. They function as follows:

  • JIF: a measure which designates the overall impact of an entire journal, based on that journal's prestige, citations, and authorship.
    • a common problem with JIF is that it does not accurately provide counts for individual articles, and unfairly weights articles with minimal impact higher because of a journal's overall popularity while weighing articles with more citations unfairly low due to their being published in a journal with a low JIF.
  • H- score: provides a measure that is weighted in favor of the author rather than the journal. H- scores rise alongside the number of citations attributed to a specific author.
    • H- scores are weighted in favor of authors who have more publications in print. Authors who are at the early stages of their careers are unfairly impacted by this measure.
  • RCR: balances authorship, number of citations per article, and journal popularity according to discipline. By focusing on discipline-specific research methods, RCR attempts to negate the broad brushstroke techniques employed by other systems of bibliometric measurement.

 Where to find metrics 

Web of Science

Different databases employ different metrics; however, Web of Science includes complete readouts of different metrics (including H- score and JIF). Web of Science also includes its own in-house metrics scale that measures publications by number of views. This measure affects how results are loaded in response to a search query. Articles with more views tend to appear higher on the results list.

Scopus & Scimago

Scimago is an open access database that ranks journals according to prestige. Journals that are established, have more publications that get cited, and with more popular authors are listed higher in the rankings. Scimago allows users to search by discipline.

Scopus is similar to Web of Science, in that it places emphasis on citations and maps networks of citations across disciplines. Scopus relies on SNIP, a method that is similar to the NIH's RCR method mentioned above.

iCite

iCite is a service developed and funded by the NIH. It ranks papers according to RCR. iCite has the potential to deliver more balanced measures than Web of Science or Scopus; however, iCite only includes papers published in MEDLINE from 1995 to present.