Finding Nobel Laureates' Research with "Author Finder" Feature

The 2009 recipients for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry were announced yesterday. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology), Thomas A. Steitz (Yale University), and Ada E. Yonath (Weizmann Institute of Science) were awarded the prize for "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome."

The Nobel Prize web site links to three researchers' home institution web pages, from which you can access a list of publications of Ramakrishnan and Yonath, and even the full text of many of the articles.

But, you also have access to many of these publications through library article databases (for example, Web of Science), with the accompanying database features such as:

• Direct links to the research articles' cited works
• Links to articles that have *cited* the researchers' articles
• Links to other related articles
  
• Ability to export article citations to a citation management software like RefWorks or EndNote

So, how do you find the Laureates' works in an article database? It can get tricky. For example, in Web of Science, there are five authors with the last name "Ramakrishnan" and the first initial "V." But if you try the Web of Science "Author Finder" feature (see image above) you can limit an author search by subdiscipline and home institution much more easily that if you entered this information into the "Search" or "Advanced Search" screens.

Questions about finding the Laureates' articles or the "Author Finder" feature? Let me know.


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