ASBMB Today, May 2002
The HighWire Press Portal: Search and Track your Favorite Journals Easily

[In the February issue, ASBMB Today introduced the new "portal" site from Stanford's HighWire Press: the HighWire Library of the Sciences and Medicine (http://highwire.stanford.edu). In March we began a series of short articles highlighting tools or features of this new site for researchers' sore eyes, starting with the ability to quickly see which articles are freely available to you. This month we continue the series with a look at how you can have the system keep track of your favorite journals, including the JBC, Molecular & Cellular Proteomics, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education, and the Journal of Lipid Research.]

The new HighWire portal allows you to instantly search abstracts from all 4,500 journals in Medline, plus the full-text of over 325 journals hosted by Stanford's HighWire Press. For the full-text journals, a registered user (registration is free, and takes less than a minute) can tell the portal which of the HighWire-hosted titles are your "favorite journals". Then, some special capabilities are available for those designated favorites.

The portal's designers observed that labs typically monitor a few dozen journals, and that individuals in labs each take responsibility for knowing what is new and important in just a handful among those journals. So the system has features to help you take a narrow focus when you want to search several journals -- but only your favorites - and to help you keep track of new content in these favorite journals.

Search Scope - You can click a button on any search form and instantly restrict the scope of a search to include only your favorite journals. Note the radio button labeled "My Favorite Journals" in the center column of the HighWire home page shown (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Home page with "My Favorite Journals" Listed

Search-result Highlighting - In any search result display - whether limited to favorite journals or not -- the portal will highlight citations from your favorite journals by showing the journal cover over a purple bar (see the Figure 2, showing citations from a search on "Cell Proliferation and Cell Fate", with the recent JBC article highlighted).

Figure 2: Search Results for "cell proliferation and cell fate"

Monitor new Content - The HighWire home page identifies what the most current content is in each of your favorite journals, and lists your favorite journals in order by most recent content date. It also provides quick links to the newest content, the journal home page, the current-issue Table of Contents page, and the search page for each of your favorite journals. It also shows a tiny version of the new-issue cover for each journal. See the listing of My Favorite Journals in the right column of the HighWire home page shown. Later on, the portal will have a new alerting feature allowing you to restrict your CiteTrack alerts to include only your favorite journals.

Getting Started

To put these Favorite Journal features to work for you, you must tell the portal which journals are your favorites.

• Step 1: If you haven't already, you will need to Register with the portal (this takes only a minute), by clicking on the Register link on the HighWire home page. If you have already registered, you will need to sign-in.
• Step 2: After registering or signing in, first time users will see a "What is this?" link under the heading My Favorite Journals. Click on "What is this?" to be taken to a short summary of the My Favorite Journals feature, including the link "Create/Modify "My Favorite Journals' preferences".
• Step 3: Click on the "Create/Modify "My Favorite Journals' preferences" link and checkmark which journals are your favorites. After making your selections and clicking the submit button, you are returned to the portal home page, and the Favorite Journal features will be active, with a new [edit] link at the bottom of your selected journals. You can easily change your Favorite Journal list just by clicking on [edit].