Some People Just Gotta Google©

“Cessation of work is not accompanied by cessation of expenses.” -- Cato The Elder

Today’s action item: Ask your vendor rep about automatic authentication.

In order to be effective researchers, your team needs to keep up with published results from researchers working in other organizations.

You know this.

So your organization has chosen, at great expense, to subscribe to one or more online databases.  And yet, your people persist in Googling or Yahooing or Binging to find what they need.

Fortunately, many online vendors like ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com/) will work with you to enable your team members to access, through the magic of automatic authentication, the full text of subscribed content even if they find it on a search engine like Google©.  Your vendor rep probably will be able to explain how to do this.  No doubt you will have to get IT involved.  Oh, well.

It will be well worth the aggravation   Not only will you increase usage of the expensive subscription service, you will get ideas on how to promote its use within your organization to make the subscription a go-to source at least as important as the popular search engines.

To illustrate …

Imagine a researcher on your team is looking for recent articles dealing desulfurization using ionic liquids.  She or he finds the following on Google© Scholar …

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COSMO-RS based predictions for the desulphurization of diesel oil using ionic liquids: Effect of cation and anion combination

R Anantharaj… - Fuel Processing Technology, 2011 - Elsevier
... COSMO-RS based predictions for the desulphurization of diesel oil using ionic liquids: Effect
of cation and anion combination. ... Abstract. Ionic Liquids ILs provide an important alternative in
removing aromatic sulphur compounds by Liquid–Liquid Extraction (LLE). ...

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When your researcher clicks the hyperlink he / she sees …

If you have set everything up correctly, your researcher will be automatically authenticated to access the full text of the article with no further action on her / his part.

And, you may be able to use results like this to nudge your team in the direction of searching the subscribed database directly … which is why you subscribed in the first place.

Today’s  bonus action item: Add the Desulfurization Blog (http://www.desulf.blogspot.com/) as a feed on your organization’s Intranet. It will provide a continuing series of tips on how to search the Web for valuable research results.