University of Chineses Academy of Sciences

On September 27, a lecture about how to use the library resources was held at Yanqihu campus of the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS). The lecture was made by Ms Dong Yujia from Yanqihu library, which aimed to let international students know about the English translation of each part of the library homepage for easy access in the future. The lecture started with a Chinese statement “工欲善其事，必先利其器”, which means “To do a good job, one must first sharpen one’s tools.”

Firstly, Ms Dong provided the library link and tald the students how to access the direct link of the library website. Chinese databases such as CNKI, Wanfang database and Vip database, etc. as well as English databases as ACS, RSC, Wiley, Elsevier-SD, Cambridge, Springer, Nature, Science, IEEE, ACM, ProQuest are avaliable on the library website. Other useful sites on the website are also introduced . The access of the abovementioned databases is available if the student only present at the UCAS Campus as the access is IP restricted. If document delivery and other services are needed, students need to create their own accounts by themselves when they are at the UCAS IP. The library had subscribed to many titles from each popular eBook platform. The major publishers for eBook as follows:

The library has the access to the Elsevier-SD publisher which counts 24,242 publications (journals & books) from a total of 31,883 publications, 76% of the total content provided by the publisher. In another aspect, the library grants access to SciFinder (Chemical Abstracts Service), the most potent tool for referencing and indexing the publications of different fields such as chemistry, chemical engineering, materials science, environmental engineering, geology, medicine, and physics. This site is highly appreciated by the students as just by subscribing the email alerts service; the site emails the students with the recent peer-reviewed articles in their fields on daily/weekly/monthly basis. As SciFinder is highly secured, student who is willing to access this site must use his real name, UCAS email, and UCAS IP during the registration process. After telling students how to access different databases and how to get resources securely without excessive downloading, Ms Dong passed to another reference site like Encyclopedia Britannica, addressing the way to use it appropriately.Also, Ms Dong gave enough details for Library Service Link, reader account, recommend purchasing, Interlib loan, and IC room booking. Although the library databases guarantee an easy-to-search way for students to find their required keywords related to their work, the search engines have great coverage to extra materials like trade reports, governmental reports, scientific news, etc. The alternative to Google Scholar is Baidu Scholar (Baidu xueshu: http://xueshu.baidu.com), which is considered as a powerful search engine that can provide all possible sites that host the searched article providing the direct link for each paper from hosting publishers. In another trusted way of searching, the UCAS library has access to the database called “Web of Science, WOS”. This database provides quality guaranteed search results that only searches in the titles or keywords that are only present in peer-reviewed journals, so the search results will be retrieved from multiple databases by just one click. The library also helps the students to correctly referencing their citations easily and quickly using the purchased software called EndNote X8. After the  lecture, the majority of students got familiar with the library site even it is displayed in Chinese, and were able to recognize the different databases they interested in.

1- Given names: Ricardo David

Family names: Avellán Llaguno

Type of scholarship: Chinese Government Scholarship

Major: Bachelor (Biologist), MSc (Biotechnology), PhD student (Toxicogenomics/ Molecular Toxicology)

Country: Ecuador

“Training on the use of the bibliographic resources available through the portal of the UCAS is important  for the development of our student exercise. The immense amount of information available today makes it essential to take efficient management of it, through this strategy, it will be possible for us to tackle new themes on the basis of the technology already tested without falling in the repeatability and thus avoid the loss of time and resources. It is important that we have been informed of the capabilities of each of these virtual portals, as well as the dynamics of the campus library to reach a correct achievement of our academic objectives and scientists. It should be noted that for an exercise held of our professional activity we must commit ourselves also to self-taught training, activities like this lecture allow us a development suitable to achieve correctly our goals and good service for the world in which we live.”

2- Given names: Ahmed

Family names: Zaki Alhalemy Kassem

Type of scholarship: CAS-TWAS Fellowship

Major: Bachelor (Chemistry), MSc (Physical Chemistry), PhD student (Physical Chemistry)

Country: Egypt

“I am delighted to hear that my most favorite site, SciFinder, is subscribed by UCAS, and this site is essential for any researcher to keep up to date with the recently published articles in any field as the site indexes publications on a daily basis. I already have studied in different international institutions before coming to China, but I have found UCAS offers a variety of resources extending from electronic databases, physical books borrowing till purchasing required software that is needed by any researcher. Nevertheless, I highly recommend to the library to subscribe plagiarism checking sites such as iThenticate or Turnitin, and grammatical errors checking sites like Grammarly. This will help the UCAS students to contribute more publications with high quality and in a well-written manner.”

Written by : El Sayed Mohamed El Sayed Ahmed（Egypt）