guidelines for searching scientific literature on …wvpaepeg/ftp/vikram/...ghent university faculty...
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GHENT UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF ENGINEERING AND ARCHITECTURE
DEPARTMENT OF MATERIALS, TEXTILES AND
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING (EA11)
GUIDELINES FOR SEARCHING
SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE ON
THE INTERNET
(Version September 2017)
Author: Prof. dr. ir. Wim VAN PAEPEGEM
Ghent University
Faculty of Engineering and Architecture
Department of Materials, Textiles and Chemical Engineering
Technologiepark-Zwijnaarde 903
9052 Zwijnaarde
Belgium
Tel. : +32-(0)9/331.04.32
Fax : +32-(0)9/264.58.33
Searching scientific literature on the Internet Table of contents
i
Table of contents
1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 1
1.1. OUTLINE ...................................................................................................................... 1
2. SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE SEARCH ....................................................................... 2
2.1. CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE RESOURCES ............................................ 2 2.2. WEB OF SCIENCE ......................................................................................................... 3
2.2.1. Introduction ........................................................................................................ 3 2.2.2. Consulting the Web of Science ........................................................................... 5 2.2.3. Links ................................................................................................................. 18
2.3. SCIENTIFIC LIBRARIES ............................................................................................... 19 2.3.1. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 19 2.3.2. Interlibrary loan request .................................................................................. 24
2.3.3. Reprints ............................................................................................................ 28 2.3.4. Links ................................................................................................................. 29
2.3.4.a. Belgium ........................................................................................................ 29 2.3.4.b. International ................................................................................................. 29
2.4. OPEN ARCHIVES ........................................................................................................ 30 2.4.1. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 30
2.4.2. Links ................................................................................................................. 32 2.5. WEBSITES OF UNIVERSITIES AND RESEARCH INSTITUTES ........................................... 33
2.5.1. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 33
2.5.2. Links ................................................................................................................. 33
2.5.2.a. Belgium ........................................................................................................ 33 2.5.2.b. Europe .......................................................................................................... 33 2.5.2.c. International ................................................................................................. 34
2.6. PORTAL WEBSITES FOR SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION ..................................................... 36 2.6.1. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 36
2.6.2. Links ................................................................................................................. 36 2.6.2.a. Science in general ........................................................................................ 36
2.6.2.b. Materials ...................................................................................................... 36 2.7. WEBSITES OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES AND ASSOCIATIONS ........................................... 37
2.7.1. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 37
2.7.2. Links ................................................................................................................. 37
2.7.2.a. Belgium ........................................................................................................ 37 2.7.2.b. International ................................................................................................. 37
2.8. WEBSITES OF INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS FOR STANDARDIZATION .................. 39
2.8.1. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 39 2.8.2. Links ................................................................................................................. 39
2.9. WEBSITES OF SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS .......................................................................... 40 2.9.1. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 40 2.9.2. Links ................................................................................................................. 40
2.9.2.a. Science in general ........................................................................................ 40 2.9.2.b. Materials ...................................................................................................... 40
2.10. WEBSITES OF GOVERNMENT INSTITUTIONS ............................................................... 42 2.10.1. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 42
2.10.2. Links ................................................................................................................. 42 2.10.2.a. Belgium ........................................................................................................ 42
Searching scientific literature on the Internet Table of contents
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2.10.2.b. Europe .......................................................................................................... 42
2.10.2.c. International ................................................................................................. 42 2.11. WEBSITES OF INSURANCE COMPANIES ....................................................................... 43
2.11.1. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 43 2.11.2. Links ................................................................................................................. 43
2.12. COMPANY WEBSITES ................................................................................................. 44 2.12.1. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 44 2.12.2. Links ................................................................................................................. 44
2.13. PATENT DATABASES .................................................................................................. 45 2.13.1. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 45 2.13.2. Links ................................................................................................................. 51
2.14. WEBSITES OF NEWSPAPERS ....................................................................................... 53 2.14.1. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 53
2.14.2. Links ................................................................................................................. 53 2.15. SEARCH ENGINES ....................................................................................................... 54
2.15.1. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 54
2.15.2. Links ................................................................................................................. 54 2.15.2.a. General ......................................................................................................... 54 2.15.2.b. Materials ...................................................................................................... 54
2.16. NEWSGROUPS, FORUMS AND BLOGS .......................................................................... 55 2.16.1. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 55 2.16.2. Links ................................................................................................................. 60
3. STAY UPDATED ........................................................................................................... 61
3.1. E-MAIL ALERTING SERVICES ...................................................................................... 61
3.2. REFERENCE MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE ...................................................................... 62 3.2.1. Reference Manager and Endnote ..................................................................... 64
3.2.2. Importing references from Web of Science ...................................................... 67 3.2.3. Using EndNote or Reference Manager with MS Word .................................... 69
4. MICROSOFT WORD: TIPS AND TRICKS .............................................................. 72
4.1. USING STYLES ........................................................................................................... 74 4.2. USING FIELD CODES AND BOOKMARKS ...................................................................... 80 4.3. USING CAPTIONS AND CROSS-REFERENCING FOR FIGURES AND TABLES .................... 93
4.4. USING PAGE BREAKS AND SECTION BREAKS .............................................................. 97 4.5. USING HEADERS, FOOTERS AND PAGE NUMBERING .................................................. 100 4.6. AUTOMATICALLY GENERATING A TABLE OF CONTENTS .......................................... 106
4.7. USING MACROS FOR AUTOMATIC NUMBERING OF EQUATIONS ................................. 110
4.8. SOLVING LAYOUT ISSUES ........................................................................................ 117 4.8.1. Aligning lists and paragraphs ........................................................................ 117 4.8.2. Formatting tabular data ................................................................................. 122
4.8.3. Formatting figures .......................................................................................... 122 4.8.4. Creating charts ............................................................................................... 123
4.8.5. Formatting equations ..................................................................................... 124 4.8.6. Grouping or splitting words ........................................................................... 127 4.8.7. Using MS Word newsgroups .......................................................................... 127
1
Chapter 1
1. Introduction
1.1. OUTLINE
The aim of this tutorial is to assist students and researchers in searching for scientific
literature on the Internet. Most university libraries, and the Ghent University library in
particular, have done major efforts to improve the access to electronic catalogues and archives
and to offer electronic access to international journals.
Despite these efforts, a lot of students and researchers are not fully aware of the potential of
these services, because mastering these skills is not part of the regular education.
Therefore a general overview of the different ways to search for scientific literature will be
given in this tutorial.
In Chapter 2, an overview of the most important resources for scientific literature is presented,
and for each of these resources, the way of exploring them is explained.
In Chapter 3, some advices are given to stay updated, because a literature study is not a once-
only activity, that is done only at the beginning of the research. It should be a continuous
effort to keep track of the published literature about the research area you are working in.
Finally, in Chapter 4, some tips and tricks are given for efficiently working with large
documents in Microsoft Word. These skills can be useful when writing your Master or PhD
thesis.
Not all services that are mentioned in this tutorial, are accessible from outside the Ghent
University network (e.g. access to library archives, electronic web-access to international
journals). For some services, the IP address of your computer is checked and if it does not
match with one of the computers that are registered on the Ghent University network, you do
not get access.
If you try to access the Ghent University network with a dial-up connection or a broadband
connection from an external internet provider, you need to establish a VPN (Virtual Private
Network) connection, so that your computer is virtually part of the Ghent University network.
To use VPN, you need to activate your VPN password. You can do that electronically on the
website https://password.ugent.be/, but this website is only accessible from the computers that
physically are part of the Ghent University network.
Once you have activated your VPN password, you can install a VPN connection on your local
computer by following the instructions on the DICT helpdesk website
(http://www.helpdesk.ugent.be/vpn/en/). Do not forget to add the VPN server (157.193.46.4)
as a trusted server to your firewall (ZoneAlarm personal firewall, Windows XP firewall,
Norton firewall,...), otherwise the VPN connection will be refused by your firewall.
2
Chapter 2
2. Scientific literature search
2.1. CLASSIFICATION OF SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE RESOURCES
In the following paragraphs, the different (scientific) literature resources have been
subdivided in a number of categories. Some categories contain resources that have first been
reviewed and approved by scientific experts, other categories contain information which has
been made public on the sole responsibility of the publisher (e.g. websites of industrial
companies and newsmagazines). The following categories have been distinguished as sources
of (scientific) information:
Web of Science
scientific libraries
Open Archives
websites of universities and research institutes
portal websites for scientific information
websites of scientific societies and associations
websites of international organizations for standardization
websites of scientific journals
websites of government institutions
websites of insurance companies
company websites
patent databases
websites of newspapers
search engines
newsgroups, forums and blogs
Each of these categories is discussed in the subsequent paragraphs.
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2.2. WEB OF SCIENCE
2.2.1. Introduction
In order to explain where the Web of Science stands for, it is first explained how the scientific
output of universities and research institutes is classified. In global, four categories of
scientific output are distinguished: (a) articles in national and international journals;
(b) books; (c) conference contributions and patents; (d) dissertations and PhD theses. Each of
these four categories is again divided in a number of subcategories, as shown in Table 2.1.
Table 2.1 Classification of scientific output.
a1 international journal papers indexed in the Science Citation Index (SCI)
a2 papers in renowned international journals with peer-review process, but not included
in (a1)
a3 papers in national journals with peer-review process, but not included in (a1) or (a2)
a4 papers not included in (a1), (a2) or (a3)
b1 books (limited to books published by a scientific publisher – no courseware or
dissertations)
b2 chapters in books (no conference proceedings)
b3 books as editor (including editor of conference proceedings)
c1 papers in proceedings of scientific conferences (full papers with exclusion of
abstracts)
c2 patents
c3 papers in proceedings of scientific conferences (only abstracts)
d1 PhD dissertations
d2 Master dissertations
p1 conference papers indexed in the ISI Proceedings
The first subcategory, a1, contains all articles indexed in the so-called Science Citation Index
(SCI). This a1 subcategory is internationally considered as the most important category of
scientific publications, because it only contains those articles that have been reviewed by
international experts and that later on have been published in a renowned international
journal. The company Thomson Scientific and Healthcare has developed a database in which
all these a1 publications have been included (from 1972 till present) and this commercial
database has been given the name Web of Science. The Web of Science database is not
allowed to offer the full text of all these articles for download, because the copyright on the
full texts is possessed by the publisher of the international journal in which the publication
appeared. So the Web of Science database only indexes the bibliographic information of all a1
articles (title, authors, abstract, publication source, etc.).
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In recent years, the number of a1 publications published by the university as a whole and by
the researcher as an individual has become a very important parameter for evaluating the
performance of the university and its researchers. For the university, this means that its
funding by the Flemish government depends to a large extent on the (relative) output of
a1 publications compared to other universities. For the individual researcher, the number and
quality of his/her a1 publications strongly determines his/her chances for success when
applying for research projects and other funding channels.
What are the different steps in the publication process of these a1 articles ?
first, the researcher or the research team reports the new results in a scientific article. This
article is almost always written in the English language, it discusses the research
methodology, the obtained results and their relevance to the research community and it
compares, if possible, with relevant results that have already been published in the past by
other research groups in the same field of interest.
the authors send the article to the editor of the international journal of their choice. Not any
international journal can publish a1 articles, only a selected set of internationally renowned
journals is allowed to do so. It is the same company Thomson Scientific & Healthcare that
keeps track of these international journals. This database is called Journal Citation Reports
(JCR). Only the international journals that are ranked in the Journal Citation Reports
database, are allowed to publish a1 articles. This Journal Citation Reports database also
contains all details of the international journal:
- the ISSN-number (International Standard Serial Number),
- the publisher of the international journal (Elsevier Science, Blackwell Publishing,
Cambridge University Press, IEEE, John Wiley & Sons, Kluwer Academic Publishers,
Sage Publications, Springer Verlag,...),
- the impact factor of the international journal. This impact factor is very important and
measures the “impact” or “penetration level” of this journal. It is a measure for the
frequency by which an “average” article in this journal is cited by other authors during a
certain time period (typically one year). So indirectly the impact factor is also a measure
for the reputation of the journal and the number of readers in the research community.
Renowned journals such as Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Cell, Science,
The Lancet,... have impact factors of 20, 30 and more, while most international journals
have impact factors varying from 0.5 till 5. It is easy to imagine that an article with new
insights in the treatment of cancer will be read and cited by more researchers than an
article describing the style of singing of the nightingale in summer.
In total, about 7 700 international journals from all disciplines (medicine, sciences,
psychology,...) are indexed in the Journal Citation Reports.
next, the submitted article is sent by the editor to a few international experts (the so-called
referees or reviewers) who are considered to be an authority in their research domain. They
write down their reviewers’ comments and send them back to the editor, who in turn sends
these comments to the authors of the article. The reviewers’ comments are always
anonymous.
This process is called the peer review process, because the review process is done by peers
in the research domain.
if the verdict of the international experts is favourable, the authors are asked to send their
final version to the publisher of the international journal. In most cases the publisher is a
professional and commercial company such as Elsevier Science, Kluwer Academic
Publishers, Springer Verlag, etc. Sometimes, the publisher is an academic society, such as
Searching scientific literature on the Internet Chapter 2: Scientific literature search
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SEM (Society for Experimental Mechanics), ASTM (American Society for Testing and
Materials) or IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).
Once published, the article is indexed in the Web of Science database.
Consulting the databases of Thomson Scientific & Healthcare is not for free. Our university
pays a yearly licence fee so that students and researchers have access to these databases. In
the next paragraph it is further explained how the Web of Science database can be consulted.
2.2.2. Consulting the Web of Science
As the access to the Web of Science database is not for free, the webserver of Thomson
Scientific & Healthcare checks if the IP-address of the client belongs to the university
network of UGent. For all computers in the PC rooms and different departments of the
faculties, this is no problem, because they are registered as part of the UGent computer
network by DICT (Directie Informatie- en Communicatietechnologie). If you want to access
the Web of Science from a home computer that has Internet access through another provider
(Belgacom, Telenet,...), you must install a Virtual Private Network (VPN), so that your
computer is recognized as part of the university network. More details about the installation
of VPN can be found on the website of DICT (http://www.helpdesk.ugent.be/vpn/). It is
worth to mention that the IP-address of the VPN server (157.193.46.4) should be included in
the list of ‘trusted servers’ of your personal firewall (Norton Firewall, ZoneAlarm,...).
Otherwise it will not work.
Then, you are ready to visit the webpage http://isiknowledge.com/, the portal site for all
commercial databases that are owned by Thomson Scientific & Healthcare. This web-based
platform has been given the collective name ISI Web of Knowledge. The opening screen looks
like Figure 2.1. For us, the product Web of Science is the most important and this can be
easily accessed through the link "Web of Science Core Collection" in the drop-down menu.
Figure 2.1 Opening screen of the ISI Web of Knowledge.
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If you proceed in this way to the Web of Science database, the welcome screen in Figure 2.2 is
opened. At the bottom of the screen, you can find the different databases that are contained in
the Web of Science database:
the “Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED) --1955-present” contains all
peer-reviewed journal papers that have been published worldwide in the Science Citation
Index since 1955. All journal papers that are found in this database correspond to the
UGent-category a1 that was mentioned in Table 2.1,
the “Conference Proceedings Citation Index- Science (CPCI-S) --1990-present” is a very
recent database and indexes all papers that have been published at distinguished
conferences. Here again, only certain conferences with a good scientific reputation are
allowed to index their papers in this database. All papers in this database correspond to the
UGent-category p1 that was mentioned in Table 2.1,
the other databases contain papers in research areas belonging to social sciences or art and
humanities.
Figure 2.2 Welcome screen of Web of Science.
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To search for a1 papers, you can tick off all check boxes, except the first check box for
“Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED) --1955-present” as shown in Figure
2.2, because the articles in the other databases do not belong to our target group and would
only slow down the searches in the database.
The default search method is “Search” as indicated on the leftmost tab on top of the page.
Now, you can search for the bibliographic information of all a1 publications that have been
published in all international journals that are part of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR)
index from 1955 till present.
The result of such a search in the Web of Science database strongly depends on the quality of
the search string that you enter. It is strongly recommended to always make use of wildcards
and Boolean operators, with a combination of multiple search terms. Such approach yields far
better results than entering one single, very general search term.
Table 2.2 shows an overview of the use of Boolean operators for Web of Science. Table 2.3
shows an overview of the use of wildcards.
Table 2.2 Overview of the use of Boolean operators.
Searching scientific literature on the Internet Chapter 2: Scientific literature search
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Table 2.3 Overview of the use of wildcards.
Searching scientific literature on the Internet Chapter 2: Scientific literature search
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You can always find the most updated version of these guidelines by clicking the “Help”
button in the Search screen (see Figure 2.2) and then clicking the “Help contents” button in
the rightmost corner, as shown in Figure 2.3. The information listed in Table 2.2 and Table
2.3 can be found in the sections “Search operators” and “Wildcards” respectively.
Figure 2.3 Help screen of Web of Science.
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Instead of using the Boolean operators and wildcards in the “Search” interface, you can also
choose the “Advanced search” interface, by clicking the “Advanced search” tab in Figure 2.2.
However, as this “Advanced search” interface is not structured very well, it is better to use the
Boolean operators and wildcards in the “Search” interface, and that is the way that will be
further followed in this document.
In the example of Figure 2.4, we search for all a1 publications that contain the words
“impact”, “damage”, “composite*” and “simulation”. The search string is "impact AND
damage AND composite* AND simulation".
The first screen with results is shown in Figure 2.5.
Figure 2.4 Search string “impact AND damage AND composite* AND simulation”.
Searching scientific literature on the Internet Chapter 2: Scientific literature search
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Figure 2.5 Results of the search.
The results are listed with first the title of the a1 publication, then the authors, next the
international journal in which it was published, the number of citations and finally the “SFX”
symbol. When you click on the title of the a1 publications, you get the full bibliographic
information, including the abstract of the article.
The “SFX” symbol is something special. If you click on this link, the software checks if you
have access to the full text of the selected publication. How is this possible ? The underlying
“SFX” technology first checks to which institute your computer belongs, in this case the
UGent university network. Then it makes connection to the library server of your institute and
checks if your institute has an electronic subscription for the international journal in which the
selected article was published. If your institute has such an electronic licence, the “SFX”
technology forwards you to the website of the publisher where you can freely download the
full text PDF of the selected article.
Searching scientific literature on the Internet Chapter 2: Scientific literature search
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The developer of this “SFX” technology is Dr. Herbert Van de Sompel, former head of the
automation department of the UGent university library. The idea was born from his PhD
research1 and from February 2000 on, the software is commerically distributed by Ex Libris
(http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/SFXFAQ).
If you return to the list of articles that were shown in the search results (see Figure 2.5), you
will see that for example the articles published in the journals Composites Part A, Composites
Part B, Composite Structures and Composites Science and Technology are all available for
download. Indeed, if you click on the “SFX” link for those records, you will see the screen
depicted in Figure 2.6. This screen informs you that an electronic version of this article is
available at Elsevier. This means that our university pays the subscription for the international
journal Composites Science and Technology which is published by Elsevier.
If you click on the “Go” button, you can download the full text PDF version of the selected
article.
Unfortunately, it is not always that easy to obtain the full text version of the articles. Suppose
that we are looking for articles that describe which type of gripping tabs you should use for
compression testing of composites. Search therefore for the keywords “compression AND
composite* AND tab*” and restrict the search to the title only. The results are listed in Figure
2.7.
Figure 2.6 Result of the SFX-link.
1 Van de Sompel, H. (2000). Dynamic and context-sensitive linking of scholarly information.
Doctoraatsproefschrift in de Politieke en Sociale Wetenschappen : Communicatiewetenschappen. Universiteit
Gent, Februari 2000.
Searching scientific literature on the Internet Chapter 2: Scientific literature search
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Figure 2.7 Results of the search “compression AND composite* AND tab*” (title only).
The search only yields five results, and the second and third result are even not relevant,
because related to pharmaceutical sciences. If you click on the “SFX” button for the fourth
search result, it appears that an electronic version is not available, and the software advises
you to search yourself in the UGent university library, as shown in Figure 2.8. This means
that Ghent University does not have an electronic subscription for the international journal
Polymer Composites.
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Figure 2.8 “SFX” result for the international journal Polymer Composites.
Why is one article available for full text download and another not ? There are various
reasons:
as explained before, Thomson Scientific & Healthcare offers the Web of Science database
containing the bibliographic information of all a1 publications published since 1972.
However, the copyright for distributing full text electronic copies of those publications is
owned by the publisher of the international journal, not by Thomson Scientific &
Healthcare. So for every single international journal, Ghent University has to pay a licence
to the publisher for full text electronic access. If you consider that the electronic
subscription for one single international journal of the Journal Citation Reports index can
range from 1 250 EUR to 2 500 EUR per year and that about 7 700 international journals
are listed in the Journal Citation Reports index, it is for every university financially
impossible to have an electronic subscription to all international journals of the Journal
Citation Reports index. So Ghent University makes a selection of international journals
that are most relevant to its researchers and pays the electronic subscription for these
journals,
this process of electronic subscriptions and full text PDF download is a phenomenon of
recent years, thanks to the Internet and advanced server applications. The vast majority of
the electronic licences of our university have started from 1998, others from 2000. For
most of the international journals where our university has an electronic subscription now,
electronic download is not possible for a1 articles published before 1998 or 2000,
a last possible reason is that Ghent University has an electronic subscription, but that the
most recent articles are not available for full text download. Indeed, some publishers give a
discount on the licence fee, but under the restriction that the most recently published
articles (e.g. from the last year) are not available for full text download.
Searching scientific literature on the Internet Chapter 2: Scientific literature search
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Summarized, there are a number of reasons why an a1 article might not be available for full
text download. In that case, as suggested by the “SFX” software, you can search in the Ghent
University catalogue if a paper version is available for request, or you can request the article
from another library. These options will be discussed in the next section 2.3.
The Ghent University library has set up a central website where you can find for which
international journals an electronic licence is paid by our university. This webpage is
http://elin.ugent.be/. The welcome screen is shown in Figure 2.9.
The most interesting sections are “E-journals” and “E-articles”.
Figure 2.9 Welcome screen of ELIN.
In the section “Browse” you can search for a specific international journal and check if our
university has an electronic licence for it. Be very careful with the syntax of the search string,
because the search engine is very poor.
For example, wildcards do not work, and you can only search for journal titles, starting with a
certain text string. If you enter the search string “composite”, all electronic journals with a
title starting with “composite” will be shown (see Figure 2.10).
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Figure 2.10 Search results for “composite” in ELIN.
Table 2.4 lists (in alphabetical order) the international journals for which Ghent University
has an electronic subscription and which are most relevant for this course. The right column
mentions the year in which the electronic subscription has started.
Table 2.4 List of relevant journals for which Ghent University has an electronic subscription.
Name Year
Composite Structures 1998
Composites Part A 1998
Composites Part B 1998
Composites Science and Technology 1998
Computers & Structures 1998
Engineering Failure Analysis 1998
Engineering Fracture Mechanics 1998
European Journal of Mechanics A – Solids 1999
European Polymer Journal 1998
Fatigue & Fracture of Engineering Materials & Structures 1998
Finite Elements in Analysis and Design 1998
International Journal of Fatigue 1997
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International Journal of Fracture 1999
International Journal of Mechanical Sciences 1999
International Journal of Solids and Structures 1998
Journal of Aerospace Engineering 1995
Journal of Applied Mechanics 2000
Journal of Composites Technology & Research 1998
Journal of Engineering Materials and Technology 2000
Journal of Engineering Mechanics 1995
Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering 2000
Journal of Materials Science 1999
Journal of Materials Science Letters 1999
Journal of Optics A – Pure and applied optics 1999
Journal of Polymer Sc. Part A-Polymer Chemistry 1997
Journal of Reinforced Plastics and Composites 2000
Journal of Thermoplastic Composite Materials 2000
Materials Science & Engineering R-Reports 1998
Materials Science and Engineering A 1998
Mechanics of Materials 1998
Optics and Lasers in Engineering 1998
Polymer Testing 1998
Progress in Materials Science 1998
The Web of Science database offers the full collection of a1 publications since 1955,
independent of the electronic subscriptions that your university or research institute has. If
you make a search in this database, you never know beforehand if you will have access to the
full text version of the article.
Therefore ELIN offers the search engine “LibHub E-articles” (see Figure 2.9). This search
engine limits your query to those international journals where Ghent University has an
electronic subscription. In this search engine, the advanced search options are available, as
opposed to the limited search options in the section “E-journals”.
Although this method is easier, because you are sure that you can download the full text
paper of every listed result, it is not recommended to proceed in this way for three reasons:
there might exist articles which are very important for your research, but are not in the
possession of our university. When searching through ELIN, you will not be aware of their
existence, while if you search through Web of Science, you are at least aware of their
existence and you can try to request these articles from another library,
apart from the electronic licenses that are paid by the central library of our university, a lot
of department libraries have their own subscriptions to specific international journals.
Indeed, if a specific international journal is so important for the research of that department
and the central library does not pay an electronic subscription for that journal, the
department can decide to pay the subscription itself. However, these subscriptions are not
indexed in the ELIN search engine,
finally, before 1998, Ghent University also had a lot of subscriptions for international
journals, but almost all of them were paper versions. All the older volumes of these
international journals are still available in the Ghent University library in the Rozier street,
but you cannot search for articles in these older journal volumes through the ELIN website.
Although they are older, those articles can be very important, because they might be
written by pioneers in that research field or a lot of recent articles might be based on the
Searching scientific literature on the Internet Chapter 2: Scientific literature search
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results published in that old article. Fortunately you can find these articles through the Web
of Science database.
In the next paragraph we will discuss which alternatives exist when the full text article is not
available for electronic download through the “SFX” technology.
2.2.3. Links
http://www.helpdesk.ugent.be/vpn/: manual for setting up a Virtual Private Network
(VPN) on the Ghent University network
http://isiknowledge.com/: portal site for Web of Science and Journal Citation Reports
http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/sfx_faq.htm: explanation about the SFX-protocol
http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/SFXFAQ: portal site of the Ghent University
library for searching full text electronic articles
http://www.sciencedirect.com/: portal site of Elsevier Science to search for full text
electronic articles published by Elsevier only
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2.3. SCIENTIFIC LIBRARIES
2.3.1. Introduction
Apart from the electronic subscriptions for international journals, the Ghent University library
has of course a lot of other scientific literature in its archives: old printed issues of
international journals with a current electronic subscription, printed issues of international
journals which are not distributed in electronic form, books, older master theses and doctoral
theses, etc.
All these volumes are categorized in the so-called MeerCat catalogue of the Ghent University
library. This catalogue has for the moment over 800 000 holdings of books and journals, all in
the possession of the UGent central library, faculty libraries or department libraries. The
majority of these titles has been bought after 1984. Volumes older than 1984 are registered in
a filing card cabinet.
The MeerCat catalogue is accessible through the webpage http://search.ugent.be/ which is
shown in Figure 2.11 (or through the library home page http://www.lib.ugent.be/ and
selecting “Search collections”). The Dutch interface is of course also available.
Figure 2.11 Welcome screen of the Ghent University MeerCat catalogue.
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If you search for a particular article in the Web of Science database (see previous section 2.2.)
and the “SFX” link shows that there is no electronic subscription, then the “SFX” technology
will advise you to search for a paper version in the UGent university library.
Suppose that you are looking for the following article in the Web of Science database:
Tsai, S.W. and Wu, E.M. (1971). General theory of strength for anisotropic materials.
Journal of Composite Materials, 5, 58-80.
So the “SFX” software suggests to find out if the paper version is available in the UGent
university library.
Figure 2.12 Result of the “SFX” link if there is no electronic version available of the requested article.
If you click on this link, you arrive at the screen shown in Figure 2.13.
If you click on the name of the journal, more detailed information about this journal is listed,
as shown in Figure 2.14.
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Figure 2.13 Search results for “Journal of Composite Materials”.
Figure 2.14 Detailed information about “Journal of Composite Materials”.
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The ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) number of the journal is shown, together
with the name of the publisher and information about the availability. The line:
UGent-BIB [BIB.P.013860] Holdings: #1(1967) – 35(2001) ONTBREEKT: 11
means the following:
UGent-BIB is the abbreviation of the library where the journal is available. All UGent
libraries (faculty libraries, department libraries, central library) have a unique code. For us,
the most important library codes are:
BIB: Central library
T52: Library of Department of Mechanical Construction and Production – Labo
Soete (IR04)
T57: Library of Department of Information Technology (IR05)
T59: Library of Department of Textile Engineering (IR11)
T70: Library of Department of Mechanical Construction and Production –
Mechanics of Materials and Structures (IR04)
TBBS: Library of Faculty of Engineering
The complete list can be found on the UGent library website (http://www.lib.ugent.be/)
under the heading “Inlichtingen” / “Information”.
the Shelf number is the internal holdings number of the particular library where the journal
is available. In this case the holdings number is P.013860.
the Holdings information indicates from which period there has been or there still is a
subscription. In this case, the UGent central library BIB has had a subscription from the
very first volume of this journal in 1967 till the volume 35 in year 2001. From the next
issue on, the university library has changed to an electronic subscription.
The last line of the record information provides a link to the request form, where you can
request a particular issue of this Journal of Composite Materials. If you click on this link, the
electronic request form of Figure 2.15 is opened.
In this form, you fill in your name, e-mail address, UGent-ID (13-digit barcode on your
student card) and the year, volume, issue and page range of the requested journal. You can
find all these data in the Web of Science database through the bibliographic information of the
article that you were looking for.
After clicking the “Send”-button, your request is sent to the library administration. They will
collect the requested volume of the journal from their archives and make it available in the
reading room of the central library. Once it is available there, you will receive an e-mail from
the library administration that the requested issue of the journal is available for you. This
notification message usually follows a few hours after your e-mail request. Then you can go
to the central library and take a copy of the article that you were looking for.
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Figure 2.15 Request form for the international journal Journal of Composite Materials.
You can also use MeerCat to check the holdings of a certain journal directly, without going
through the SFX-link. If you enter the search string “journal of composite materials” in the
search screen of http://www.lib.ugent.be/meercat, you get the results shown in Figure 2.16.
The first result is the paper version of the “Journal of Composite Materials”.
As mentioned above, you can find a lot of interesting journals in the individual department
libraries as well (T52, T57, T59, T70,...). The library of the Department of Textile
Engineering, T59, deserves special mention, because it owns several important journals in the
field of composite materials:
Fiber
Journal of Reinforced Plastics and Composites
Journal of Textile Engineering
Journal of Thermoplastic Composite Materials
Materials Technology
Polymer Composites
Textile Research Journal
Textiles
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Figure 2.16 Result of search for “journal of composite materials” in MeerCat catalogue.
2.3.2. Interlibrary loan request
It is possible that neither an electronic version, nor a paper version of the article that you are
looking for, is available in the UGent library. That means that our university has no electronic
subscription for the moment and has never had any subscription in the past for that particular
international journal. As explained above, it is impossible for every university to subscribe to
all international journals due to the high financial cost.
Then, there is yet another possibility, called interlibrary loan request. This means that our
university library sends your request to the library of another university where the journal is
available. However, our university library will not send out your request to all these university
libraries without knowing in which university library the journal is available. Therefore you
are expected to investigate yourself in which university library the journal (and the correct
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volume and issue !) is available and then enter an interlibrary loan request on the website of
the UGent central library. This request is sent by our library administration to the external
library, where the requested article is copied and sent back. This service is not for free and
costs about 5.00 EUR per article.
If you need a lot of articles, it is far more cheaper to travel to that library and copy all needed
articles over there.
The detailed procedure is as follows:
First you check yourself if the international journal (and the correct volume and issue) is
available in another university library. The most common university libraries to check, are:
the campus library Arenberg (CBA) from the Catholic University of Leuven (KULeuven),
where all books and journals from the faculties of Sciences, Engineering, Bio-Engineering
and Kinesiology and Rehabilitation Sciences are grouped together
http://www.wbib.kuleuven.be/
the university library of the Free University of Brussels (VUB)
http://www.vub.ac.be/BIBLIO/index_en.html
the university library of the “Université de Liège” (ULg)
http://source.ulg.ac.be/
the university library of the Technical University of Delft (TUDelft)
http://www.library.tudelft.nl/
Once you have found the correct volume and issue of the international journal, you enter an
interlibrary loan request on the website of our library. For that purpose, the MeerCat
catalogue cannot be used. You need to go to the ALEPH catalogue, another catalogue of the
university library, that is available through http://www.lib.ugent.be/aleph. In the welcome
screen you select the option “interlibrary request” in the title bar, as shown in Figure 2.17.
In the next screen, your login-ID and password is requested, as shown in Figure 2.18. The
login data are your login and password that you received from the DICT for accessing the
mail servers and data servers of the university.
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Figure 2.17 Welcome screen of the Ghent University ALEPH catalogue.
Figure 2.18 Login procedure for the catalogue system of the Ghent University library.
After you have logged in, the screen of Figure 2.19 appears. There you can fill in all details of
your request.
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Figure 2.19 Electronic form for an interlibrary loan request.
More information can be found on the UGent library website http://www.lib.ugent.be/ under
the heading “Inlichtingen”/”Information”. In the FAQ section, you look for IBL
(Interbibliothecaire leenaanvraag) or Interlibrary loan request, as shown in Figure 2.20.
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Figure 2.20 Procedure for an interlibrary loan request.
2.3.3. Reprints
If all methods described above do fail, there is one alternative left, and that is asking a reprint
from the authors of the publication themselves. In the bibliographic information of the article
in the Web of Science database, you will normally find the contact details of the so-called
corresponding author. That is the author who takes care of all communication about the
article.
You can request a reprint (a printed or electronic copy) of the article from the corresponding
author. Although this seems as the most easy method, it should be the last option to try,
because of two reasons:
if every researcher in the world would do his/her literature study in this way, authors of
famous articles would receive so many requests that they could never answer them all,
it is the primary task of the university libraries to make the scientific literature accessible
for its researchers, so this is the starting place for literature search.
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2.3.4. Links
2.3.4.a. Belgium
http://www.lib.ugent.be/: Ghent University library
http://www.lib.ugent.be/meercat: MeerCat catalogue
http://www.lib.ugent.be/aleph: ALEPH catalogue
http://lib1.ugent.be/cmsites/Default.aspx?alias=NL_zoek_Hoe_IBLaanvraag: FAQ about
the interlibrary loan request (in Dutch)
http://www.wbib.kuleuven.be/: campus library Arenberg KULeuven
http://www.vub.ac.be/BIBLIO/index_en.html: university library VUB
http://www.kbr.be/start_nl.html: Royal Library of Belgium
http://source.ulg.ac.be/ : library of the Université de Liège
2.3.4.b. International
http://www.library.tudelft.nl/: library of the Technical University of Delft (TUDelft)
http://www.plos.org/: Public Library of Science
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/: Scientific Literature Digital Library
http://www.loc.gov/: Library of Congress (largest library in the world)
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2.4. OPEN ARCHIVES
2.4.1. Introduction
Open Archives is an initiative that promotes the free and unlimited, worldwide distribution of
scientific information in electronic form, in the first place peer-reviewed international
publications (http://www.openarchives.org/). Indeed, during the last few years, there is a
growing pressure from the universities and research institutes to make scientific literature
available to the large public free of charge. Of course, the commercial publishers are quite
reluctant, because they want to maintain the system of paid subscriptions.
The Ghent University library is an enthusiastic defender of the Open Archives Initiative and
offers access to so-called open archives repositories on its own website, such as:
BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com/): publisher of 180 peer-reviewed open
access journals,
DOAJ - the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/): this service covers
free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. There are now 2807
journals in the directory. Currently 851 journals are searchable at article level,
Caltech Collection of Open Digital Archives (CODA) (http://library.caltech.edu/digital/):
this repository was launched in 2000 and has grown to include electronic theses, technical
reports, books, conference papers, and oral histories from the Caltech archives,
...
All these open archives repositories are integrated into the UGent e-sources (ELIN) library
(http://elin.ugent.be/), as already shown in Figure 2.9.
To increase its worldwide visibility, Ghent University has decided that the output of its
researchers in terms of publications, PhD theses and master theses must be made public as
much as possible. Therefore the university library has created its own open archive repository
that is called the UGent Academic Bibliography and Institutional Archive. The welcome
screen of its website http://biblio.ugent.be/ is shown in Figure 2.21.
In the UGent Academic Bibliography, the bibliographic information (not the full text) is
stored of all publications of all UGent researchers, regardless the type of contribution (journal
paper, conference paper, book chapter, PhD thesis, etc.). The UGent Bibliography database is
very similar in concept to the Web of Science database.
Besides that archive, the UGent Institutional Archive is a repository of full text publications,
books, PhD theses and Master theses written by researchers or students of Ghent University.
Unfortunately, this repository is far from complete, because if a paper is published by a
commercial publisher (Elsevier, Springer,...), the copyright is transferred from the author to
the publisher and the author is not allowed to reproduce his/her article in an open archive.
However, Ghent University has tried to settle agreements on this transfer of copyright with
several publishers.
In the search form on the home page (Figure 2.21), you can look up the bibliographic
information of all scientific literature that is produced by UGent researchers.
Every researcher who works at Ghent University has the duty to enter his/her publications
into the UGent Bibliography through the input module that is only accessible after login as
UGent personnel member (login button in the top right corner of Figure 2.21). The interface
of this input module is shown in Figure 2.22. This web-based software allows every
researcher to add his/her own records to the UGent Academic Bibliography and upload his/her
publications into the UGent Institutional Archive.
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Figure 2.21 Welcome screen of the UGent Institutional Archive.
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Figure 2.22 Input module for the UGent Bibliography.
2.4.2. Links
http://biblio.ugent.be/: UGent Academic Bibliography and Institutional Archive
http://www.doaj.org/: Directory of Open Access Journals
http://www.openarchives.org/: Open Archives Initiative
http://www.sparceurope.org/: The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
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2.5. WEBSITES OF UNIVERSITIES AND RESEARCH INSTITUTES
2.5.1. Introduction
Once you have acquainted yourself with your subject of interest, you will gradually learn
which universities and research institutes are leading organizations in that research domain.
Then it is possible to consult the website of these universities and research institutes for more
information about their current projects and research activities on the particular subject.
A list with the websites of almost all universities in the world is the Braintrack University
Index (http://www.braintrack.com/country.htm).
Other interesting research institutes are ESA (European Space Agency), NASA (National
Aeronautics and Space Administration), RTO (Research & Technology Organization of the
NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)), ...
2.5.2. Links
The links below only cover websites that are interesting for this course. This list is not at all
exhaustive and the searching techniques described above can be used to discover a lot more
interesting websites.
2.5.2.a. Belgium
http://www.ugent.be/ir/dmse: website of the Department of Materials Science and
Engineering (IR10) at Ghent University
http://www.mtm.kuleuven.be/Research/C2/poly/index.htm: CMG (Composite Materials
Group) at KULeuven
http://www.mtm.kuleuven.ac.be/: Department of Metallurgy and Materials Engineering at
KULeuven
http://wwwtw.vub.ac.be/memc/website/index.htm: Department of Mechanics of Materials
and Constructions at the VUB
http://www.ulg.ac.be/ltas/: Laboratoire de Techniques Aeronautiques et Spatiales (LTAS)
at the Université de Liège (ULg)
http://www.cobo.rma.ac.be/: Civil engineering & materials science Department at the
Royal Military Academy
http://www.wtcb.be/homepage/: WTCB (Wetenschappelijk en Technisch Centrum voor
het Bouwbedrijf)
2.5.2.b. Europe
http://www.cm.ic.ac.uk/: Centre for Composite Materials, Imperial College (London)
http://www.imperial.ac.uk/aeronautics: Department of Aeronautics, Imperial College
(London)
http://www.ses.soton.ac.uk/projects/Materials/materials.html: Material Research Group,
University of Southampton
http://www.eng.qmul.ac.uk/: Department of Engineering, Queen Mary University of
London
http://www.nlr.nl/public/: National Aerospace Laboratory NLR
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http://www.npl.co.uk/npl/cmmt/index.html: National Physical Laboratory, Centre for
Materials Measurement & Technology
http://www.lr.tudelft.nl/: Delft Aerospace Engineering
http://www.risoe.dk/: Risoe National Laboratory
http://www.sml.lr.tudelft.nl/index.php: Delft Aerospace Structures & Materials Laboratory
http://bf.rtu.lv/~icas/engl/index.htm: Institute of Materials and Structures (IMS), Riga
Technical University
http://www.pg.gda.pl/~kkrzyszt/Eng/index.html: Department of Materials Science and
Engineering, Gdansk University of Technology
http://www.lma.cnrs-mrs.fr/p21.htm: Laboratoire de Mecanique et d'Acoustique (CNRS)
http://www.iabg.de/index_en.php: IABG: structural tests for Airbus A380
http://www.tu-harburg.de/index_e.html: Technische Universitat Hamburg-Harburg
http://www.ivw.uni-kl.de/: IVW: Institut fur Verbundwerkstoffe
http://www.aero.polimi.it/EN/: Politecnico di Milano
http://www.ilsb.tuwien.ac.at/: Institut fur Leichtbau and Struktur-Biomechanik
(Technische Universitat Wien)
http://aar.arcs.ac.at/: Austrian Aeronautics Research
http://www.ifb.uni-stuttgart.de/ : Institut fur Flugzeugbau
http://www.esa.int/: European Space Agency
2.5.2.c. International
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/: NASA information services
http://techreports.larc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/ntrs: NASA Technical Reports Server
http://www.sti.nasa.gov/RECONselect.html: CASITRS, Centre for AeroSpace
Information/ Technical Report Server
http://techreports.larc.nasa.gov/ltrs/ltrs.html: Langley Technical Reports Server
http://stinet.dtic.mil/: Scientific and Technical Information Network (STINET)
http://www.msfc.nasa.gov/: NASA's Marshall Space Fligth Center
http://www.wrs.afrl.af.mil/library/tech_rpts.htm: Technical Reports of Wright Research
site
http://techreports.larc.nasa.gov/ltrs/: available online NASA published documents at the
Langley Research Center, one of the NASA research centres
http://naca.larc.nasa.gov/: documents from the NACA (National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics), in 1958 turned into NASA
http://www.nasa.gov/techinfo.html: National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA) Technical Information
http://www.dtic.mil/: Defense Technical Information Center
http://www.rta.nato.int/Abstracts.asp: Publications of Research & Technology
Organisation (RTO) of NATO
http://science.nasa.gov/default.htm: Science@NASA
http://www.nttc.edu/default.asp: National Technology Transfer Center
http://wwweng.uwyo.edu/mechanical/facilities/compositematerials/30years.html:
University of Wyoming - Dept. of Mechanical Engineering
http://www.composites.ubc.ca/: Composites group at University of British Columbia
http://www.esm.vt.edu/: Dept. of Engineering Science and Mechanics, Virginia
Polytechnic, Blacksburg
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http://www.mengr.tamu.edu/: Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University ;
J.N. Reddy
http://www.trl.com/: "Composite Charaterization Center" of Touchstone Research
Laboratory Ltd., private company in the USA.
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2.6. PORTAL WEBSITES FOR SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION
2.6.1. Introduction
Portal sites are often a good starting point for acquiring fast knowledge about the topic of
interest. Again the list below covers only websites that are related to this course.
2.6.2. Links
2.6.2.a. Science in general
http://www.technoport.be/: portal site for Technologisch Vlaanderen
http://www.research.be/: portal for scientific research in Belgium
2.6.2.b. Materials
http://www.azom.com/: The A to Z of Materials
http://www.netcomposites.com/: NetComposites
http://composite.about.com/: The Composite Guide
http://www.advmat.com/links.html: The Composites Corner with links to advanced
composite websites
http://www.kunststofnet.nl/: KunststofNET
http://www.plastics.com/: Plastics.com
http://www.plasticx.com/a/px0100.html: Plasticx Universe
http://www.plasti.com/: The World of Plastics
http://www.matweb.com/: Online Materials Information Resource
http://dmoz.org/Business/Industrial_Goods_and_Services/Materials/Composites/: Open
Business Directory about composites
http://www.compositn.net/index.htm: COMPOSIT - The future use of composites in
transport
https://www.cstsales.com/home.htm: The Composites Store
http://www.polymerplace.com/: Polymer place
http://www.compositesnews.com/: Composites News International
http://www.performance-materials.net/: Performance Materials Net
http://www.scientific.net/: Materials Science
http://www.nanotechweb.org/: Global portal for nanoscience
http://www.nano.be/: To be Nano (Belgium)
http://nano.gov/: National Nanotechnology Initiative
http://www.nanoforum.org/index.php: Nanoforum - European Nanotechnology Gateway
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2.7. WEBSITES OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES AND ASSOCIATIONS
2.7.1. Introduction
A number of scientific societies have acquired great fame in their field. In the engineering
sciences, some of the well-known societies are:
the American Society for Materials (ASM)
the American Society for Testing of Materials (ASTM)
the Society for Experimental Mechanics (SEM)
the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering (SAMPE)
the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
A more or less complete list of scientific societies can be found on
http://www.osti.gov/eprints/societies.
Most of these leading scientific societies have their own press and regularly publish
international journals and books, but also on their website, you can sometimes find a lot of
interesting articles.
2.7.2. Links
2.7.2.a. Belgium
http://www.cfwb.be/arb/home.htm: The Royal Academy of Science, Humanities and Fine
Arts of Belgium (Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone
Kunsten van Belgie)
http://www.kvab.be/: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van Belgie voor Wetenschappen en
Kunsten
http://www.flandersdrive.be/ : Flanders Drive (interest group for the Flemish automotive
industry)
http://www.ti.kviv.be/: Technologisch Instituut van de Koninklijke Vlaamse
Ingenieursvereniging (KVIV)
http://www.agoria.be/gen-nl/home-nl.htm: Association of Belgian manufacturers of
reinforced plastics / composite materials Reinforplast (Agoria)
2.7.2.b. International
http://www.asm-intl.org/: American Society for Materials (ASM)
http://www.awea.org/: American Wind Energy Association
http://www.iabse.ethz.ch/: IABSE (International Association for Bridge and Structural
Engineering)
http://www.rilem.net/: Rilem Publications
http://www.ewea.org/: European Wind Energy Association
http://www.windpower.org/en/tour/manu/bladtest.htm: Danish Wind Energy Assocation
http://roger.ecn.purdue.edu/~asc/: American Society for Composites
http://www.sme.org/cma/: Composites Manufacturing Association of SME
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https://www.acmanet.org/: American Composites Manufacturers Association
http://www.sme.org/: Society of Manufacturing Engineers
http://www.pultruders.com/: European Pultrusion Technology Association
http://www.jeccomposites.com/: JEC Composites
http://www.e-composites.com/: E-composites
http://www.sampe.org/: SAMPE
http://www.gprmc.be/: European Composites Industry Association GPRMC
http://www.sem.org/: Society for Experimental Mechanics
http://www.polymernetwork.org.uk/: Scottish polymer technology network
http://www.mat-irl.ie/: Materials Ireland
http://www.polymers.nl/: Dutch Polymer Institute
http://www.thinkcomposites.com/: Think Composites Europe
http://www.autocomposites.org/: Automotive Composites Alliance
http://www.compositecenter.org/: National Composite Center
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2.8. WEBSITES OF INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS FOR
STANDARDIZATION
2.8.1. Introduction
In the engineering society, a lot of national, European and international standards exist which
apply to design of buildings, mechanical testing of materials, quality management, etc.
Famous standards are:
ISO = International Standard Organization
ASTM = American Society for Testing and Materials
DIN = Deutsche Industrie Norm
BS = British Standards
EN = European Norm
NBN = Norme Belge / Belgische Norm
AFNOR = Association Française de NORmalisation
Unfortunately, international standards are only available on payment, and most standards are
quite expensive. However, the websites of these standardization bodies are very convenient to
look up the title and short abstract of certain standards, because most test reports and
publications only mention the number of the standard (e.g. “... tensile test on composite
materials following the standard ISO 527 ...”), but not the detailed reference of the standard.
2.8.2. Links
http://www.cenorm.be/catweb/: The European Committee for Standardization
http://www.bin.be/NL/index.htm: Belgisch Instituut voor Normalisatie
http://www.astm.org/cgi-bin/SoftCart.exe/STORE/store.htm?E+mystore: ASTM standards
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueListPage.CatalogueList: ISO standards
http://www2.din.de/index.php?lang=en: DIN- standards
http://www.boutique.afnor.fr/boutique.asp: AFNOR- standards
http://www.ameritech.co.uk/: BSI and ASTM standards
http://www.dstan.mod.uk/: UK Defence Standardization
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2.9. WEBSITES OF SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS
2.9.1. Introduction
In general, the websites of scientific journals do not contain that much interesting information
that is available free of charge. However, the most renowned international journals such as
Nature, Science, The Lancet,... are worth a visit.
2.9.2. Links
2.9.2.a. Science in general
http://www.nature.com/index.html: Nature
http://www.sciencemag.org/: Science
http://www.eosweb.com/: EOS
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/: National Geographic
http://www.kviv.be/hetingenieursblad/: “Het Ingenieursblad”, a publication of the
Koninklijke Vlaamse Ingenieursvereniging (KVIV)
http://www.belspo.be/belspo/scienceconnection/index_nl.stm: “Science Connection”, a
free publication of the “Federale Dienst voor Wetenschapsbeleid”
2.9.2.b. Materials
http://mrdec.fpms.ac.be/bsmee/english/ejmee.html: European Journal of Mechanical and
Environmental Engineering (E. Dick)
http://www.elsevier.com/inca/publications/store/3/0/4/3/3/index.htt: International Journal
of Fatigue
http://www.interscience.wiley.com/jpages/0029-5981/: International Journal for Numerical
Methods in Engineering
http://www.elsevier.com/inca/publications/store/4/0/5/9/0/6/index.htt: Optics and Lasers in
Engineering
http://www.elsevier.com/inca/publications/store/3/0/3/9/9/index.htt: Composites Part A:
Applied Science and Engineering
http://www.elsevier.com/inca/publications/store/9/8/4/index.htt: Composites Part B:
Engineering
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=8756-758X&site=1: Fatigue and
Fracture of Engineering Materials & Structures
http://www.elsevier-deutschland.de/ijleo: Optik (Urban und Fischer)
http://www.elsevier.com/inca/publications/store/4/0/5/9/2/9/index.htt: Composites Science
and Technology
http://www.asme.org/pubs/amr/index.htm: Applied Mechanics Reviews
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/15376494.asp: Mechanics of Advanced Materials
and Structures
http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/0191-5665/contents: Mechanics of Composite
Materials
http://www.jeccomposites.com/publications/jcmhome.html: JEC Composites Magazine
http://www.materialstoday.com/: Materials Today (free subscription)
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http://www.reinforcedplastics.com/: Reinforced Plastics
http://www.acletters.org/: Advanced Composites Letters on-line
http://www.pubs.asce.org/journals/cc.html: Journal of Composites for Construction
http://scitation.aip.org/cco/: Journal of Composites for Construction
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2.10. WEBSITES OF GOVERNMENT INSTITUTIONS
2.10.1. Introduction
The websites of government institutions are often useful for background information
regarding a certain topic, or to find the governing regulations in a specific application field.
In this context, the website of CORDIS (Community Research & Development Information
Service) should definitively be mentioned. The CORDIS website is the web portal for all
information about finished, ongoing and planned research activities, funding initiatives and
innovation projects on the European level. In their database, you can look up information
about every research project that has been or is being funded by the European Union. You can
find the topic of the project, the allocated budget, the names of all partners, etc.
2.10.2. Links
2.10.2.a. Belgium
http://awi.vlaanderen.be/: Science and Innovation division of the department of Science,
Innovation and Media of the Flemish community
http://www.belspo.be/belspo/home/port_nl.stm: Federal Science Policy (Belspo)
http://www.stis.fgov.be/fdwti.htm: Federal Scientific and Technical Information service
http://www2.vlaanderen.be/IWETO/DOCS/thema_pag.html: IWETO research database of
the Flemish community
http://www.vrwb.vlaanderen.be/index.html: Flemish Council for Science Policy (advising
body of the Flemish Community)
http://www.vlaanderen.be/ned/sites/weten/weten_f.htm: Science and technology in
Flanders
2.10.2.b. Europe
http://www.cordis.lu/: CORDIS database of the European Community
2.10.2.c. International
http://www.ntsb.gov/default.htm: National Transportation Safety Board
http://www.faa.gov/: Federal Aviation Administration
http://av-info.faa.gov/: Aviation Information Website
http://www.scitech.gov/: Catalog of U.S. Government Science and Technology Web Site
Resources
http://www.ntis.gov/search/index.asp: National Technical Information Service
http://www.nsf.gov/: National Science Foundation
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2.11. WEBSITES OF INSURANCE COMPANIES
2.11.1. Introduction
Sometimes, insurance companies offer on their website relevant documents for safe design of
engineering structures. For example, on the website of Det Norske Veritas one can find quite
some information on design of large wind turbines.
2.11.2. Links
http://www.dnv.com/: Det Norske Veritas
http://www.dnv.dk/windturbines/: DNV Windturbines
http://www.lloyds.com/index.asp: Lloyds
http://www.gl-group.com/start.htm: Germanischer Lloyd AG
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2.12. COMPANY WEBSITES
2.12.1. Introduction
Although the (scientific) information on company websites is often subjective and difficult to
check, it can offer interesting case studies of industrial projects with a lot of illustrations and
technical details.
Also, they often report about the big contracts that they have won for large engineering
projects.
2.12.2. Links
http://www.lm.dk/UK/home/default.htm: LM Glasfiber
http://www.reichhold.com/: Reichhold Inc. composites business
http://www.boeing.com/phantom/flash.html: Boeing Phantom Works
http://www.dow.com/Homepage/index.html: The Dow Chemical Company
http://www.vosschemie.be/ned/info.asp: VOSSCHEMIE Polyester De Moor
http://home.wxs.nl/~windsh/produkt.html: Wind turbine manufacturers
http://www.fibreglast.com/: Fibre Glast Developments Corp.
http://www.porcher-ind.com/: Porcher Industries (industrial textiles)
http://www.hexcelfibers.com/default.htm: Hexcel Fibers
http://www.saertex.com/englisch/frame_en.html: Saertex industrial fabrics
http://www.tencate-ac.com/indexi.php: Ten Cate Advanced Composites Group
http://www.fiberglass.com.hk/: Yeung's Fiberglas Co., Hong Kong
http://www.rohacell.com/: Rohacell
http://www.airbus.com/A380/default1.aspx: Airbus A380 Navigator
http://winshiprc.tripod.com/carbon_fiber_composites.htm: Carbon Fiber Composites
http://www.cstsales.com/: The Composites Store
http://www.core-international.nl/: Turby windturbine
http://www.wally.com/default.asp?bflash=1: Wally sailing yacht
http://www.tdfcompositi.com/: TDF Compositi
http://www.hollandcomposites.nl/: Holland Composites Industrials
http://www.material.be/products/products.html: Material (Filament winding software)
http://www.clc.tno.nl/projects/recent/kolibri.html: Kolibri design and analysis tool (TNO)
http://www.subor.com.tr/english/html/Products.html: Subor GRP Pipes
http://www.eurofighter.com/: Eurofighter Typhoon
http://www.eads.net/: EADS - European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company
http://www.boeing.com/flash.html: Boeing Company
http://boeingmedia.com/index.cfm: Boeing Media
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/aeronautics/: Lockheed Martin - Joint Strike Fighter
Overview
http://www.go-one.de/ukindex.shtml: Go-one monocoque carbon bike
http://www.twikeklub.ch/: Composite bikes
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2.13. PATENT DATABASES
2.13.1. Introduction
At first sight, patent databases seem to be a boring source of information, but these are the
most consulted databases in the industrial world. It is sometimes surprising to see that some
companies are ranked number one regarding the number of patents in an industrial branch that
seems to have nothing to do with their core business. For example, the cosmetics concern
L’Oréal has the largest number of patents in the area of nanotechnology, because most health
products that are applied onto the human skin (creams, moisturizers, salves,...) have nano-
particles in it.
The requirements for a patent can be summarized as follows2:
the invention must be new, that means that it has not been made public ever before, and not
anywhere in the world. So it cannot have been described already in a publication (by the
inventor or somebody else), mentioned in a lecture or used or sold in public. An invention
which already is part of the technical state-of-the-art, can never be considered as new,
the invention must be innovative, that means that the concept is not straightforward. If the
invention has been the result from a simple conclusion based on existing theories or
methodologies, the criterion of innovation is not fulfilled,
the invention must be applicable in the industrial world, meaning that it can be
manufactured by or applied in industry. It should be something “technical”. However this
word can be interpreted in a broad sense, for example also agriculture falls into this
category.
If the invention complies with the requirements of novelty, innovation and industrial
applicability, it is possible to request for a patent. You cannot patent artistic creations,
mathematical models, plans, schemes or other purely mental processes.
Each country has its own patent office. A patent is only valid in the country or countries in
which it has been applied for. If somebody has a Belgian patent and a company in France
makes use of this invention, there is no violation of the patent. Then also a patent in France
should be necessary.
Due to this reason, it is possible to apply for a patent for a complete region as a whole, for
example the European Union, or the United States of America. The European patent office is
located in Munich (Germany). If you apply for a European patent there, you have to submit
only one application to get protection in all European countries. Unfortunately, the costs for
such a patent can run quite high, ranging from 8 000 to 12 000 EUR.
Patents give effective protection if you have invented new technology that will lead to a
product, composition or process with significant long-term commercial gain. In return, patent
applicants must share their know-how by providing a full description of how their invention
works. This information becomes public and can provide the basis for further research by
others.
A patent typically lasts about 20 years and the patent fee must be paid every year ! One
interesting side effect of modern day patent usage is that the inventor of the patent can use the
exclusive right to grant licenses to other companies. This allows the inventor to accumulate
capital quickly from licensing the invention and may allow rapid innovation to occur because
he or she may choose to not manage a manufacturing buildup for the invention. Thus the
2 http://www.demerkplaats.nl/demerkplaats.htm
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inventor's time and energy can be spent on pure innovation, allowing others to concentrate on
manufacturability.
More information about patents can be found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent.
The most important patent databases are the ones from the European Patent Office and the
United States Patent and Trademark Office. The patent database of the European Patent
Office can be consulted free of charge by every national web portal. The English interface is
available at http://worldwide.espacenet.com/ (a Dutch and French interface are also available
at http://be.espacenet.com/, but updating is done less frequently). The welcome screen is
shown in Figure 2.23.
Figure 2.23 Welcome screen of the patent database of the European Patent Office.
If you click in the left navigation toolbar on “Advanced search”, then the search screen in
Figure 2.24 is shown.
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Figure 2.24 Advanced search screen of the patent database of the European Patent Office.
The easiest way is of course to look for keywords in the title or abstract, if you are looking for
patents in a certain application area. Unfortunately a lot of companies try to hide their patents
by leaving out all relevant keywords from the title. Even in the abstract, which is normally
controlled by the patent authority, the most obvious keywords are often omitted.
Therefore the most efficient way to search for patents, is starting with the International Patent
Classification (IPC). This classification contains 69,000 subcategories for patents and is
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maintained by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The European
Classification (formerly known as ECLA, now called CPC = Cooperative Patent
Classification) is very similar, but even more detailed than the International Patent
Classification.
Once you have the IPC or CPC classification number, it is much more efficient to search for
specific patents.
The International Patent Classification (IPC) catalogue can be searched on
http://www.wipo.int/classifications/ipc/en/index.html, as shown on Figure 2.25.
Figure 2.25 International Patent Classification (IPC) catalogue.
If you click the first link “Browse and Search the Current IPC” below the title, you are
directed to the search screen as shown in Figure 2.26.
An even more refined classification number can be found in the Cooperative Patent
Classification (formerly known as ECLA = European Classification). This catalogue is
accessible by following the link “Classification search” in the left navigation toolbar in Figure
2.23 and the resulting search screen is shown in Figure 2.27.
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Figure 2.26 Searching the International Patent Classification (IPC) catalogue.
Figure 2.27 Searching the European Classification (CPC) catalogue.
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It is very important to know that the search for keywords takes place in the titles and
abstracts of the patent documents, not in the classification description.
This can lead to strange results. For example, the name of the CPC category B62K3 is
“Bicycles”. You can reach this classification by clicking the main category B “Performing
operations; Transporting” in Figure 2.27, then B62 “Land vehicles for travelling otherwise
than on rails”, next B62K and finally B62K3.
The B62K3 classification “Bicycles” is shown in Figure 2.28.
Figure 2.28 B62K3 classification “Bicycles”.
You could also search directly for the keyword “Bicycles” in the CPC classification (Figure
2.27), the search engine shows the results in Figure 2.29. The classification B62K3 is listed as
the first result.
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Figure 2.29 Results of the CPC search for the keyword “Bicycles”.
Once you have found the correct classification number, it is much more efficient to look for
individual patents, by using the advanced search as shown in Figure 2.24.
2.13.2. Links
http://www.european-patent-office.org/index.en.php: European Patent Office
http://ep.espacenet.com/: searchable database of all European patents
http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html: United States Patent and Trademark Office
http://www.patentfamily.de/: search for patents
http://www.search4ip.com/: patent search for free
http://www.delphion.com/: only free of charge for US patents
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http://www.wipo.int/classifications/ipc/en/index.html: International Patents Classification
(IPC) by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)
http://ep.espacenet.com/eclasrch: European Patent Classification
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2.14. WEBSITES OF NEWSPAPERS
2.14.1. Introduction
The electronic archives of the daily newspapers (De Standaard, De Morgen, De Tijd, ...) and
magazines (Knack, Le Vif/Express,...) can only be accessed with a paid subscription.
However Ghent University has a contract with the press database of Mediargus, in which the
archives of the Flemish daily newspapers are included. Therefore our university has access to
this press database, but only through the internal UGent network, not through VPN. The
website is http://www.mediargus.be/vowb/_main/m_mediasearch.asp.
2.14.2. Links
http://www.mediargus.be/vowb/_main/m_mediasearch.asp: media archive of the Flemish
daily newspapers and magazines (does only work on the internal UGent network, not
through VPN)
http://news.ft.com/home/rw/: Financial Times news search
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2.15. SEARCH ENGINES
2.15.1. Introduction
Although search engines like Google and Yahoo are widely known, they are mentioned here
deliberately as one of the last sources of scientific literature. It is clear that the scientific
information that can be obtained from the previously mentioned sources, is more objective
and far better checked than the results from a random search on the Internet.
On the other hand, a lot of links which are listed in the previous categories, have themselves
been found with the help of a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. That is why the
importance of the search engines cannot be neglected.
However, the advice that was given for the Web of Science database, still applies here: the
quality of the search results strongly depends on the quality of your search string. It is
definitively recommended to make use of wildcards and Boolean operators, with a
combinaton of multiple search terms. Such approach yields for more adequate results than the
use of one, very general search term.
Most search engines provide an “Advanced search” user interface, where you can use
wildcards, Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT,...) and multiple search terms. Always use this
“Advanced search” interface to look up information with search engines.
Every search engine also provides help pages with a lot of tips and tricks for improving your
search (e.g. for Google: http://www.google.com/help/basics.html).
2.15.2. Links
2.15.2.a. General
http://www.google.be/advanced_search?hl=nl: Google Advanced Search
http://www.google.com/help/basics.html: Google help
http://www.altavista.com/web/adv: Altavista Advanced Search
http://www.kartoo.com/: KartOO Visual meta search engine
http://www.yahoo.com/: Yahoo
http://www.lycos.com/: Lycos
2.15.2.b. Materials
http://www.wwcomposites.com/: Worldwide Composites search engine
http://www.scirus.com/: Scirus - for scientific information
http://scholar.google.com/: Google Scholar
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2.16. NEWSGROUPS, FORUMS AND BLOGS
2.16.1. Introduction
Newsgroups, forums and blogs are mentioned for the sake of completeness, but they can
rarely be considered as a reliable source of scientific information. However, they are very
useful for getting an answer to practical problems with software use (SolidWorks, Matlab,
Maple, ABAQUS,...) and programming languages (Visual C++, Java, C#,...).
Newsgroups are thematic panel discussions, which are centralized on a news server. The
administrator of this news server decides which newsgroups are offered through the server.
Some newsgroups are moderated, so that SPAM and irrelevant postings are banned from the
newsgroup.
The news server of Ghent University – news.UGent.be – can be consulted through a standard
mail client such as Outlook and Netscape (there is no login and password needed for this
news server).
In Microsoft Outlook 2003, the newsgroup reader is not activated by default. The first
activation has to be done as described in Figure 2.30 (look for keyword “newsgroups” in
Microsoft Outlook help).
Figure 2.30 How to add the News command to the Outlook Go menu (Outlook help).
You first click the “Toolbar Options” arrow which is at the rightmost side of the Standard
toolbar, next you point to the “Add or Remove Buttons” and then click “Customize”. These
actions are shown in Figure 2.31.
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Figure 2.31 Customize the buttons of the toolbars.
Next, you select the command “News” in the “Go” categorie, as shown in Figure 2.32.
Figure 2.32 Select the News command.
Finally you drag the “News” command with the left mouse button to the “Go” menu, and
release the mouse button when the “News” command is located below the “Mail” command.
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Figure 2.33 Drag this button to the Go menu.
When you now first click on this command “News”, the configuration for the news server will
appear, as shown in Figure 2.34. The only thing you need to fill in, is the name of the news
server, being news.UGent.be.
Figure 2.34 Installing the Ghent University news server.
When the configuration of the news server is finalized, you can subscribe to some of the
available newsgroups. Microsoft Outlook 2003 shows all available newsgroups on the
activated news server, and you can then choose to which newsgroups you want to subscribe.
Figure 2.35 shows part of the list of available newsgroups.
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Figure 2.35 Screen shot from the list of available newsgroups through the UGent news server
news.ugent.be.
You can also search for specific newsgroups, by entering a keyword which should be part of
the newsgroup’s name. For example, in Figure 2.36, a search is done for all newsgroups that
contain the keyword “solidworks”.
Figure 2.36 Searching for a specific newsgroup on the news server.
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Once you have been subscribed to one or more newsgroups, you can do a posting yourself to
ask for help. Most newsgroups have a very good social control. You are expected to post only
questions that are related to the topic of that specific newsgroup and that have not been
answered many times before in the same newsgroup. So it is recommended to search first
through the archive of the newsgroup, because it is very likely that your question has already
been posted before. It is also common courtesy to do the postings under your own name, and
not under some obscure pseudonym.
Below, a short list (alphabetically sorted) is shown with a number of newsgroups that are
offered by the UGent newsserver and that can be useful for engineers:
comp.cad.solidworks
comp.lang.c++
comp.lang.java
comp.soft-sys.math.maple
comp.soft-sys.matlab
microsoft.public.vstudio.development
sci.engr.analysis
sci.engr.mech
sci.materials
sci.math.num-analysis
ugent.ftwe.announce
ugent.ftwe.bwe.ad-valvas
So far, our explanation was related to the UGent news server. However, the UGent news
server only offers a very limited set of newsgroups, compared to all newsgroups that exist on
the Internet. The reason is that it takes a lot of server disk space to store all these newsgroups
and that it is not the mission of Ghent University to offer access to all newsgroups about
hobbies, travelling, music, etc.
Probably the most exhaustive list of newsgroups is offered by Google through the website
http://groups.google.com/. The welcome screen of Google Groups is shown in Figure 2.37
(you first have to login with your Gmail account).
Again, using the “Advanced Groups Search” in the right top corner, you can find a lot of
practical solutions to your problems.
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Figure 2.37 Welcome screen of Google Groups.
Contrary to newsgroups, forums are often less controlled and can be found on websites of
companies, societies, etc.
Finally, blogs are a recent phenomenon with increasing popularity, but the number of blogs
that is relevant for scientific information, is very limited. One exception maybe is the
ScienceBlog (http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/).
2.16.2. Links
http://groups.google.com/: Google newsgroup search
http://groups.yahoo.com/: Yahoo newsgroup search
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/: ScienceBlog
http://www.swugn.org/: SolidWorks Users Group Network
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Chapter 3
3. Stay updated
3.1. E-MAIL ALERTING SERVICES
Most large publishers (Elsevier, Sage Publications, Springer, Blackwell Publishing,...) offer a
free e-mail alerting service. That means that for the journals of your choice, you can receive
by e-mail the table of contents of the forthcoming issues. For every issue, all papers are listed
with their title and contributing authors in the table of contents, and a hyperlink to the
electronic version is provided in the e-mail message.
In that way, you can follow up the most recent papers that are appearing in the different
journals. You can subscribe to this alerting service by registering on the publisher’s website
and indicating for which journals you wish to receive the table of contents.
The most relevant e-mail alerting services are offered by:
Elsevier Sciencedirect: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/alerts (registration is
mandatory, but free of charge)
Relevant journals:
Composite Structures
Composites Part A
Composites Part B
Composites Science and Technology
International Journal of Fatigue
Mechanics of Materials
Optics and Lasers in Engineering
Polymer Testing
Sage Publications alerts: http://online.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts
Relevant journals:
Journal of Reinforced Plastics and Composites
Journal of Thermoplastic Composite Materials
Springer: http://www.springer.com/alertprofile
Relevant journals:
International Journal of Fracture
Blackwell Publishing: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/ealerts/
Relevant journals:
Experimental Techniques
Fatigue & Fracture of Engineering Materials & Structures
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3.2. REFERENCE MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE
From the very beginning of your research, it is important to keep a database of all articles you
have gathered. If you write your own publications or you write your PhD thesis, you will refer
to the articles from other researchers. At that point, it saves a lot of time if these citations are
managed by a reference manager. The main tasks of reference management software are:
storing all bibliographic information of your collection of articles (title, authors,
publication year, journal, volume/issue,...),
inserting citations into your text documents written in Microsoft Word or LaTeX,
automatically building the reference list at the end of your text document,
renumbering the citations in your text if you move parts of your text up or down,
changing the format of your references depending on the required format of the publisher
where you submit your publication.
Why should you use this reference management software ? Suppose that I have written the
text fragment shown below (for a conference paper, article or thesis):
Most one-dimensional damage models for fibre-reinforced composites only account for the effect of damage on the stiffness [1,2]. The degradation of the Poisson’s ratio is not included in these models. Nevertheless this degradation has been observed and is not negligible [3,4]. Bandoh et al. showed that the Poisson’s ratio of a carbon/epoxy UD laminate can drop by 50 % under static tensile loading [3], while Pidaparti and Vogt proved that the Poisson’s ratio is a very sensitive parameter whilst monitoring fatigue damage in human bone [4]. Reference list: [1] Sidoroff, F. and Subagio, B. (1987). Fatigue damage modelling of composite materials from
bending tests. In : Matthews, F.L., Buskell, N.C.R., Hodgkinson, J.M. and Morton, J. (eds.). Sixth International Conference on Composite Materials (ICCM-VI) & Second European Conference on Composite Materials (ECCM-II) : Volume 4. Proceedings, 20-24 July 1987, London, UK, Elsevier, pp. 4.32-4.39.
[2] Brondsted, P., Lilholt, H. and Andersen, S.I. (1997). Fatigue damage prediction by measurements of the stiffness degradation in polymer matrix composites. In : Degallaix, S., Bathias, C. and Fougères, R. (eds.). International Conference on fatigue of composites. Proceedings, 3-5 June 1997, Paris, France, La Société Française de Métallurgie et de Matériaux, pp. 370-377.
[3] Bandoh, S., Matsumura, K., Zako, M., Shiino, T. and Kurashiki, T. (2001). On the detection of fatigue damage in CFRP by measuring Poisson's ratio. In: Hui, D. (ed.). Eighth International Conference on Composites Engineering (ICCE/8). Proceedings. Tenerife, Spain, 5-11 August 2001, pp. 55-56.
[4] Pidaparti, R.M. and Vogt, A. (2002). Experimental investigation of Poisson's ratio as a damage parameter for bone fatigue. Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part A, 59 (2): 282-287.
If I want to insert a preceding paragraph with some additional background on damage
mechanisms in composites, and this preceding paragraph also includes a number of
references, than all subsequent references must be renumbered.
If you have inserted all references in your text automatically with reference management
software, a reference number is inserted in your text for every reference and the full reference
is added at the end of your document in the reference list.
In case of inserting the preceding paragraph, the renumbering is done automatically, and the
resulting new text fragment is shown below:
Damage in fibre-reinforced composites can take many forms [1,2]: (i) matrix cracks, (ii) fibre-matrix interface failure, (iii) fibre pull-out, (iv) delaminations, (v) fibre fracture. This damage affects the value of the elastic properties at an early stage. Especially in fatigue, the damage initiation phase can cause a pronounced drop of the elastic modulus of 5 to 10 %. In the next damage propagation phase, the stiffness continues to decrease gradually,
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ranging from a few percent for unidirectionally reinforced carbon composites to several tens of percents for multidirectional glass laminates [3]. Most one-dimensional damage models for fibre-reinforced composites only account for the effect of damage on the stiffness [4,5]. The degradation of the Poisson’s ratio is not included in these models. Nevertheless this degradation has been observed and is not negligible [6,7]. Bandoh et al. showed that the Poisson’s ratio of a carbon/epoxy UD laminate can drop by 50 % under static tensile loading [6], while Pidaparti and Vogt proved that the Poisson’s ratio is a very sensitive parameter whilst monitoring fatigue damage in human bone [7]. Reference list: [1] Mallick, P.K. (1997). Composites Engineering Handbook. New York, Marcel Dekker Inc. [2] Herakovich, C.T. (1998). Mechanics of fibrous composites. New York, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [3] Schulte, K., Baron, Ch., Neubert, H., Bader, M.G. , Boniface, L., Wevers, M., Verpoest, I. and
de Charentenay, F.X. (1985). Damage development in carbon fibre epoxy laminates : cyclic loading. In : Proceedings of the MRS-symposium "Advanced Materials for Transport", November 1985, Strassbourg, 8 p.
[4] Sidoroff, F. and Subagio, B. (1987). Fatigue damage modelling of composite materials from bending tests. In : Matthews, F.L., Buskell, N.C.R., Hodgkinson, J.M. and Morton, J. (eds.). Sixth International Conference on Composite Materials (ICCM-VI) & Second European Conference on Composite Materials (ECCM-II) : Volume 4. Proceedings, 20-24 July 1987, London, UK, Elsevier, pp. 4.32-4.39.
[5] Brondsted, P., Lilholt, H. and Andersen, S.I. (1997). Fatigue damage prediction by measurements of the stiffness degradation in polymer matrix composites. In : Degallaix, S., Bathias, C. and Fougères, R. (eds.). International Conference on fatigue of composites. Proceedings, 3-5 June 1997, Paris, France, La Société Française de Métallurgie et de Matériaux, pp. 370-377.
[6] Bandoh, S., Matsumura, K., Zako, M., Shiino, T. and Kurashiki, T. (2001). On the detection of fatigue damage in CFRP by measuring Poisson's ratio. In: Hui, D. (ed.). Eighth International Conference on Composites Engineering (ICCE/8). Proceedings. Tenerife, Spain, 5-11 August 2001, pp. 55-56.
[7] Pidaparti, R.M. and Vogt, A. (2002). Experimental investigation of Poisson's ratio as a damage parameter for bone fatigue. Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part A, 59 (2): 282-287.
Finally, it is possible that you have to change the citation style from [1], [2], [3],.. to (Mallick,
1997), (Herakovich, 1998), (Schulte et al., 1985),... The first citation style is sometimes
referred to as the IEEE style, the second one is called the “Harvard system” (or BSI standard).
More information can be found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citations. By just changing
the citation style in your reference manager, you can automatically update the citations in
your text. The result then looks like this:
Damage in fibre-reinforced composites can take many forms (Mallick, 1997; Herakovich, 1998): (i) matrix cracks, (ii) fibre-matrix interface failure, (iii) fibre pull-out, (iv) delaminations, (v) fibre fracture. This damage affects the value of the elastic properties at an early stage. Especially in fatigue, the damage initiation phase can cause a pronounced drop of the elastic modulus of 5 to 10 %. In the next damage propagation phase, the stiffness continues to decrease gradually, ranging from a few percent for unidirectionally reinforced carbon composites to several tens of percents for multidirectional glass laminates (Schulte et al., 1985). Most one-dimensional damage models for fibre-reinforced composites only account for the effect of damage on the stiffness (Sidoroff & Subagio, 1987; Brondsted et al., 1997). The degradation of the Poisson’s ratio is not included in these models. Nevertheless this degradation has been observed and is not negligible (Bandoh et al., 2001; Pidaparti & Vogt, 2002). Bandoh et al. (2001) showed that the Poisson’s ratio of a carbon/epoxy UD laminate can drop by 50 % under static tensile loading, while Pidaparti and Vogt (2002) proved that the Poisson’s ratio is a very sensitive parameter whilst monitoring fatigue damage in human bone. Reference list: Bandoh, S., Matsumura, K., Zako, M., Shiino, T. and Kurashiki, T. (2001). On the detection of fatigue
damage in CFRP by measuring Poisson's ratio. In: Hui, D. (ed.). Eighth International Conference on Composites Engineering (ICCE/8). Proceedings. Tenerife, Spain, 5-11 August 2001, pp. 55-56.
Brondsted, P., Lilholt, H. and Andersen, S.I. (1997). Fatigue damage prediction by measurements of the stiffness degradation in polymer matrix composites. In : Degallaix, S., Bathias, C. and Fougères, R. (eds.). International Conference on fatigue of composites. Proceedings, 3-5 June
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1997, Paris, France, La Société Française de Métallurgie et de Matériaux, pp. 370-377. Herakovich, C.T. (1998). Mechanics of fibrous composites. New York, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Mallick, P.K. (1997). Composites Engineering Handbook. New York, Marcel Dekker Inc. Pidaparti, R.M. and Vogt, A. (2002). Experimental investigation of Poisson's ratio as a damage
parameter for bone fatigue. Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part A, 59 (2): 282-287. Schulte, K., Baron, Ch., Neubert, H., Bader, M.G. , Boniface, L., Wevers, M., Verpoest, I. and de
Charentenay, F.X. (1985). Damage development in carbon fibre epoxy laminates : cyclic loading. In : Proceedings of the MRS-symposium "Advanced Materials for Transport", November 1985, Strassbourg, 8 p.
Sidoroff, F. and Subagio, B. (1987). Fatigue damage modelling of composite materials from bending tests. In : Matthews, F.L., Buskell, N.C.R., Hodgkinson, J.M. and Morton, J. (eds.). Sixth International Conference on Composite Materials (ICCM-VI) & Second European Conference on Composite Materials (ECCM-II) : Volume 4. Proceedings, 20-24 July 1987, London, UK, Elsevier, pp. 4.32-4.39.
3.2.1. Reference Manager and Endnote
Ghent University offers a campus license for two commercial reference managers:
Reference Manager (http://www.referencemanager.com/),
Endnote (http://www.endnote.com/)
Since only recently, both software products are developed by the same company, Thomson
ResearchSoft, a business of the Thomson Corporation, and division of Thomson Scientific.
And even a third reference manager, ProCite, is part of their portfolio.
Ghent University offers web-access to both reference managers through the server
http://athena.ugent.be/. This Athena server offers the possibility for staff and students, to use
software on any computer without having to install it on the local computer. Athena uses the
Citrix technology to make this possible. Before you can use Athena for the first time, you
need to install the Citrix client. More information about Athena can be found on
http://helpdesk.ugent.be/athena/en/.
The available software depends on the one hand on the fact that you are either staff or student
and on the other hand on the faculty you belong to. The software is ordered in 3 main groups:
(i) Office, (ii) Academic and (iii) Tools. In the folder Office all needed software for office and
administrative usage can be found. Software for academic and research purpose is placed in
the folder Academic. In Tools some smaller applications enabling you to configure a number
of settings in the Athena environment can be found. A full overview can be found via the
'Index' button on Athena.
Reference Manager and EndNote can be found in the subdirectory \Office\Extra, as shown in
Figure 3.1 (for Reference Manager, both the version 12 (default) and the old version 11 are
present).
When you run EndNote or Reference Manager through the Athena interface, the facilities to
save data on the server and on your local computer are quite limited, and the programs can
run quite slowly if a lot of users are connected. Therefore it is still recommended to install the
reference software locally.
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Figure 3.1 Launching EndNote or Reference Manager on the Athena software platform.
All campus license software can be found on the software server ‘software.ugent.be’. You can
access the software server ‘software.ugent.be’ in two different ways:
by mapping the directory \\software.ugent.be\export as a local directory,
by mapping the directory \\software.ugent.be\images as a local directory.
The directory \\software.ugent.be\export contains the executables for the software, while the
directory \\software.ugent.be\images contains the ISO images which you can download and
burn on a CD-rom. In the first case, you can install the software directly from the network
resource, while in the second case, you can do a local installation with the burnt CD-rom.
Both network directories can only be accessed with your login and password (and do not
forget to add the server as a trusted server to your personal firewall). You can find more
information on http://www.helpdesk.ugent.be/software/endnote.php. This webpage also links
to very good manuals in English and Dutch for EndNote and Reference Manager.
Regardless the type of reference manager that you are using for your articles (you can even
use Microsoft Access or Microsoft Excel to set up your database), you must make sure that
there is a unique link between the printed version (hardcopy) of your articles and its record in
the database system. Therefore you can use the record ID of the article. Once you have
entered the bibliographic information of a new article, a new record is created in the database
and this record is attributed a unique identifier or ID. If you write then this number on the
printed version of your articles, there is a unique connection between your collection of
articles and their bibliographic information in the database system.
For example, in EndNote, you can show the record ID numbers through the menu Edit >
Preferences > Display Fields > Record number, as illustrated in Figure 3.2.
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Figure 3.2 Showing the unique record ID numbers in EndNote.
For every database of references that you open, the first column will show the unique record
number. An example is shown in Figure 3.3. If you write this same record number on the
printed copy of your articles, you have a one-to-one link between your printed articles and
their record in your reference manager.
Figure 3.3 EndNote database with record ID numbers in the first column.
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3.2.2. Importing references from Web of Science
A nice feature of both Reference Manager and EndNote is the capability to import references
from the Web of Science. If you have a list of records in Web of Science (resulting from a
search) and you want to save the bibliographic information of these records in your reference
manager, you can export the records in Web of Science and import them again in Reference
Manager or EndNote.
Therefore you need to follow the next steps:
in Web of Science, you generate the list of records you want to export,
at the bottom of the webpage, as shown in Figure 3.4, below the section “Output
Records:”, you can select the records you want to export, or you can select them manually
by ticking the checkbox in front of the record,
in the same section “Output Records:”, you can now choose the option “Export to
Reference Software”,
an export file is generated and you can save this file on your computer,
finally you import this file in your reference manager.
To use this feature, the Internet Explorer software and the EndNote or Reference Manager
software should run on the same platform, meaning that if you use EndNote or Reference
Manager on Athena, you should also launch Internet Explorer from Athena to make this
export feature work.
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Figure 3.4 Exporting references from the Web of Science.
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3.2.3. Using EndNote or Reference Manager with MS Word
Basically, there are two ways to link the EndNote or Reference Manager software to your MS
Word program.
The first option is to run MS Word and EndNote/Reference Manager on Athena. When you
run MS Word 2010 on Athena, the functionalities of EndNote and Reference Manager are
automatically activated in MS Word, as demonstrated in Figure 3.5.
Figure 3.5 MS Word 2010 on Athena with toolbar for EndNote/Reference Manager.
The second option is to install both software programs (MS Word and EndNote/Reference
Manager) on your own computer.
This syllabus has been compiled with MS Word 2003 and EndNote. However, things are very
similar when using MS Word 2010 or Reference Manager.
When you start up MS Word 2003, the EndNote toolbar is appearing, as shown in Figure 3.6.
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Figure 3.6 EndNote toolbar in MS Word 2003.
If you click on the second button “EN” of the toolbar, the link with EndNote is established
and the EndNote software is launched. You can select the reference database that you want to
open, and then a screen similar to Figure 3.7 is shown.
Figure 3.7 EndNote sofware.
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You leave both progams open and return to MS Word. If you click now on the 4th button of
the EndNote toolbar, the citation that was selected in EndNote (see bottom window in Figure
3.7), is inserted in MS Word. The result is shown in Figure 3.8. As you can see, the reference
number [1] is automatically inserted after the text “This is a test to refer to a particular
article”, and at the end of the text, the full reference is automatically added. All text inserted
by EndNote has been marked with a grey background in Figure 3.8.
In that way, you can insert all references for your conference paper, article, master thesis, PhD
thesis, etc.
Of course, there are a lot more features to explore:
you can create your own styles to define how the full references should be formatted,
you can choose whether the reference list must be numbered chronologically or be
alphabetically sorted,
as mentioned before, you can change the citation style from [1], [2], [3],.. to (Jones et al.,
1993), (Spencer and Hayles, 2003), (Crawford et al., 2007),...
...
Figure 3.8 Inserting a citation from EndNote in MS Word.
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Chapter 4
4. MICROSOFT WORD: TIPS AND
TRICKS
All sections above have focussed on the methods to search for scientific literature (Web of
Science, university libraries, company websites,...) and the software to manage your
references (EndNote, Reference Manager).
The final step is writing down a comprehensive overview of this scientific literature. When
doing this, a lot of work can be saved by using automatic procedures for numbering your
figures and tables, cross-referencing to figures and tables, numbering equations, generating a
table of contents, etc.
The most efficient way to automate these procedures, is shown below for the software
Microsoft Word. All examples and screen shots have been taken with the English version of
Microsoft Word 2003.
Similar procedures can be created in LaTeX or Corel Wordperfect.
Before you proceed, make sure that you set the following options in MS Word.
Click on Tools > Options... to open the Options dialogue box. Select the View tab and select
Always in the drop-down list of Field shading. Also select the All check box under section
Formatting marks. The changes are indicated in Figure 4.1.
Figure 4.1 Settings in the Options dialogue box.
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These options make sure that all formatting marks (paragraphs, tables, page breaks, etc.) and
field codes are clearly visible. We will introduce all these concepts in the next paragraphs.
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4.1. USING STYLES
A style is a set of formatting characteristics that you can apply to text, tables and lists in your
document to quickly change their appearance. When you apply a style, you apply a whole
group of formats in one simple task.
A lot of styles are pre-defined in MS Word. The default style in MS Word is called Normal.
This style defines the standard font size, font type, paragraph alignment, tab positions, etc.
that you use in every paragraph. Further, there are other pre-defined styles like Title,
Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3,...
If you select a part of text and assign one of these styles by selecting the appropriate style in
the leftmost drop-down list of the Formatting toolbar, you will notice that the layout and style
of this part of text is changed, as you can see in Figure 4.2. Moreover, the paragraphs with a
Heading style are automatically numbered, as soon as you apply the style.
Figure 4.2 Applying paragraph styles in MS Word.
Why would you use such styles ? There are several reasons:
the Heading styles allow you to automatically number chapters, sections, subsections,
subsubsections, paragraphs, subparagraphs,... to a maximum of nine levels. If you cut and
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paste a certain section to another location in your document, all sections and dependent
heading levels are renumbered automatically,
if you want to change the style of a certain heading level (for example from 16 pt., Arial,
Bold to 16 pt., Times New Roman, Italic), you can apply this change to all headings with
the same style, only by changing the formats of that particular style,
you can automatically generate a table of contents, based on the Heading styles, as we will
show later,
the power of styles is not limited to paragraphs. The following are the types of styles you
can create and apply:
- a paragraph style controls all aspects of a paragraph's appearance, such as text
alignment, tab stops, line spacing, and borders, and it can include character formatting,
- a character style affects selected text within a paragraph, such as the font and size of
text, and bold and italic formats,
- a table style provides a consistent look to borders, shading, alignment and fonts in
tables,
- a list style applies similar alignment, numbering or bullet characters, and fonts to lists.
You can create, view, and apply styles with the Styles and Formatting task pane. To make this
task pane visible, go through Format > Styles and Formatting... The Styles and Formatting
task pane appears at the right side of your screen, as shown in Figure 4.3.
Figure 4.3 Open the Styles and Formatting task pane in MS Word.
You can select a style from the right list (e.g. Heading 3) and then click on the text box where
the heading style is shown, as illustrated in Figure 4.4. If the mouse is over the text box, you
can select the drop-down menu with the button at the right.
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Figure 4.4 Modifying paragraph styles in MS Word.
If you select the option Modify..., the Modify style dialogue box appears. This dialogue box
describes the current group of formats that is applied for the Heading 3 style. When you click
the Format button in the bottom left corner (see Figure 4.5), you can change all formatting
you like:
the font type and font size,
the alignment of the paragraph and the white space before and after the paragraph,
the numbering style: bullets, arabic numbers (1, 2, 3, ...), lower case Roman numerals (i, ii,
iii, ...), upper case Roman numerals (I, II, III, ...), lower case alphabetical characters (a, b,
c, ...), or upper case alphabetical characters (A, B, C, ...),
the position of the tab stops,
...
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Figure 4.5 Changing the formatting of a certain style.
Finally, it is very easy to define new styles yourself. Let us for example define a paragraph
style for equations. Normally, an equation is centered on the line and the equation number is
right aligned. Therefore, if we use A4 paper and the left and right margins are set to 2.5 cm,
we need a center tab at 8 cm and a right aligning tab at 16 cm. The paragraph style is for
example called Centered_equation.
To define this paragraph style, you click Format > Styles and Formatting... In the Styles and
Formatting task pane, you click the button “New Style...”. The New Style dialogue box in
Figure 4.6 is opened. You fill in the name of the new style Centered_equation, and you
indicate on the fourth line that the style for the next paragraph is again Normal. The meaning
of this latter option is that, if you hit the <Enter> key to insert a new paragraph after the
Centered_equation paragraph, this new paragraph has not the paragraph style
Centered_equation again, but the default paragraph style Normal.
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Figure 4.6 Create the new paragraph style Centered_equation.
Next, you click on the Format button in the left bottom corner to set the tab stop positions.
The Tabs dialogue box in Figure 4.7 appears. You set a center tab at 8 cm and a right aligned
tab at 16 cm. Of course, if the margins are set differently in your document, you have to
change these distances.
Figure 4.7 Setting the tab stop positions for the new paragraph style Centered_equation.
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If you now select a paragraph and you apply the Centered_equation paragraph style, you will
see that a center tab and right aligned tab are set for this paragraph. If you want, you can also
add leading and trailing white space to the Centered_equation paragraphs. Therefore, you
modify the Centered_equation paragraph style, you click on the same Format button in the
left bottom corner (see Figure 4.6) and you select Paragraph... The Paragraph dialogue box
in Figure 4.8 appears. You can choose now the spacing before and after this paragraph (e.g.
12 pt).
Figure 4.8 Setting the leading and trailing white space for the Centered_equation paragraph style.
The power of using styles is in the automatic updating. Assume that you have inserted a lot of
equations, and that then the margins have to change from 2.5 cm to 3 cm. That means that
your equations are no longer centered and that the equation number is outside the margins. If
you change the tab stop positions for the Centered_equation paragraph style, the tab stops
will be changed for every paragraph with this style.
Now we move to another fundamental tool of MS Word : field codes and bookmarks.
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4.2. USING FIELD CODES AND BOOKMARKS
Most tutorials about Microsoft Word do not even mention what field codes are. However,
field codes are widely used in every Word document, but normally you will not be aware that
a field exists. Field codes are used in a document to generate information which needs to be
changeable. Whenever you add page numbering to a document, a page field code is inserted
into the header or footer. You might also add a date field code, either in a header/footer (to
indicate when the document was last printed) or to a letter template (to save you typing in
today's date each time you want to send out a letter). Fields are also used to create an index or
table of contents and in mail merge, to pick up information from a data source. You can also
use field codes to insert document information (such as the author or file name), to perform
calculations, to create links and references to other documents or items, and to perform many
other special tasks.
As we have turned on the option Always for Field shading in the Options dialogue box (see
Figure 4.1), field codes will be shown in every document with a grey background color. This
background color will never be printed on paper, but is just a mark to easily recognize
whether a certain part of your text is a field code or not.
Let us start with an easy field code: inserting the current date and time in your document.
Click Insert > Date and Time... to open the Date and Time dialogue box. The dialogue box in
Figure 4.9 appears. You can choose the date and time format you like and then press the OK
button.
Figure 4.9 Date and Time dialogue box.
The current date is inserted in your document, as shown in Figure 4.10. You recognize the
field code by its grey background color.
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Figure 4.10 Current date inserted in the document.
The text that you see – 9/9/2007 – is only the result of the field code. The actual field code
itself can be seen by pressing <Alt>+<F9>. The field code in Figure 4.11 is shown.
Figure 4.11 Date field code.
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The special field code TIME is displayed enclosed by curly brackets {}, known as braces.
Most field codes also have switches or other options which extend their capabilities. In this
case the switch \@ “d/M/yyyy” specifies the date and time format.
In the Help information, you can always find a detailed description of the field codes and the
use of their switches (search for the keywords “field code TIME” in the Help screen). The
result is shown in Figure 4.12.
Figure 4.12 Help information on the field code TIME.
A lot more fields exist and most of them can be inserted by using the Field dialogue box. This
dialogue box is opened by clicking Insert > Field... The Field dialogue box is shown in
Figure 4.13.
Figure 4.13 The Field dialogue box.
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Some interesting field codes are listed below:
AUTHOR: insert the author’s name from the Summary tab in the File > Properties
dialogue box,
DATE: insert today’s date and time,
FILENAME: inserts the file name of the document, as recorded on the General tab in the
File > Properties dialogue box,
NUMPAGES: inserts the total number of pages in the document, using information from
the Statistics tab in the File > Properties dialogue box,
PAGE: inserts the number of the page that the PAGE field is located on,
TIME: insert current time.
Instead of using the Field dialogue box, you can insert field codes directly into your text.
However you cannot insert the necessary field braces {} by just typing these characters on the
keyboard, though you can generate them by pressing <Ctrl>+<F9>. Next you can type any
field code you want. For example, retype the TIME field code, but now with a different date
and time format, as shown in Figure 4.14.
Figure 4.14 Inserting the TIME field code with a different date and time format.
If you press <Alt>+<F9> again, you would expect to see the result of this new field code, but
only the result of the first field code is shown, not of the second one. The reason is that MS
Word does not automatically update the results of new field codes. You have to explicitly
force the updating of field codes by selecting the whole document (by clicking <Ctrl>+<a>)
and then pressing F9 (function key for updating fields). Now you should see the result of
Figure 4.15.
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Figure 4.15 Updated TIME field codes with two different date and time formats.
Another solution to update the field code result, is to insert a new field with <Ctrl>+<F9>,
and instead of pressing <Alt>+<F9>, you just press <F9> to update only the field code that is
currently modified. To toggle between the field code and the result of the field code for one
single field code, you do not press <Alt>+<F9>, but <Shift>+<F9>.
Finally, you may want to convert the result of the field code to regular text, so that the field
code is not updated any longer. Therefore you select the field and press
<Ctrl>+<Shift>+<F9>. You will see that the grey background disappears and that the field
code has turned into regular text.
If you want that updating of the field code is only blocked temporarily, you can lock the field
code by pressing <Ctrl>+<F11>.
Summarized the following shortcut keys apply to field codes.
<Ctrl>+<a> select whole document
<F9> update one or more selected fields
<Alt>+<F9> toggle field display for all fields in the document
<Ctrl>+<F9> insert new field code
<Ctrl>+<Shift>+<F9> unlink field code and convert to regular text
<Shift>+<F9> toggle field display for one individual field
<F11> go to next field
<Shift>+<F11> go to previous field
<Ctrl>+<F11> lock field (prevent manual or automatic update)
<Ctrl>+<Shift>+<F11> unlock field (allow updating)
To close this section about field codes, there is one very interesting field code you should
know of: the field code SEQ. This field code sequentially numbers chapters, tables, figures,
and other items in a document. If you add, delete, or move an item and its respective SEQ
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field, you can update the remaining SEQ fields in the document to reflect the new sequence.
The field code SEQ must be followed by an identifier. This is the name that you assign to a
series of items to number. The name must start with a letter and is limited to 40 characters
(only letters, numbers and underscores). For example, the name for a series of equations
might be “my_equations”.
For example, if you want to number your equations, you can insert the SEQ field codes as
shown in Figure 4.16. It is important to mention that the new paragraph style
Centered_equation (see Figure 4.6 and Figure 4.7) has been used to insert the tab stops
automatically.
You have to type the field code only once, and then just copy it. Next you select the whole
text (<Ctrl>+<a>), update the fields with <F9> and press <Alt>+<F9> to toggle between the
field codes and their results.
Figure 4.16 Automatic numbering of equations with the SEQ field code.
The numbered equations are shown in Figure 4.17. The grey background of the numbers
indicates that they are in fact field codes.
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Figure 4.17 Result of the numbered equations after updating all fields (<Ctrl>+<a> and <F9>).
The power of field codes is only becoming clear once you start to move text. Let us say that
Equation 3 should in fact be the first equation, instead of the last one. You just cut the whole
line and paste it in front of the two other equations. Apparently, the numbering is not updated
and the numbering sequence is (3), (1), (2). However, if you select all text again (<Ctrl>+<a>)
and update the fields (<F9>), the numbering is updated correctly, as shown in Figure 4.18.
Can you imagine how much time this saves if you have a large document with a lot of
equations and you want to move a few equations to a different location ?
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Figure 4.18 The new numbering sequence of the equations after moving Equation 3 to the first line.
One problem remains: if you want to refer in your text to Equation (3), and this Equation (3)
becomes Equation (1), how can you update that cross-reference in your text automatically ?
Therefore you use bookmarks. Bookmarks are very closely related to field codes. They
identify a location within your file that you can later refer or link to. They are a sort of “post-
it” that you attach to a specific part of text in your document and this “post-it” remains fixed
to that part of text, regardless where this text moves to.
To demonstrate this, we continue with the previous example. We add a bookmark to the
number of the Equation ‘c = a + b’. Therefore we select the field code 3 and then click Insert
> Bookmark..., as shown in Figure 4.19.
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Figure 4.19 Inserting a bookmark for equation number 3.
The Bookmark dialogue box in Figure 4.20 appears. You can enter any name you want, but
bookmark names must begin with a letter and can contain numbers. You cannot include
spaces in a bookmark name. However, you can use the underscore character to separate
words. In this case, you can use for example the bookmark name Definition_of_c. Do not use
the equation number in the bookmark name (e.g. My_equation_3), because this number can
change when you move the equation to a different location in the text. You click the Add
button to assign this bookmark name to the field code 3.
Figure 4.20 The Bookmark dialogue box.
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To refer to Equation (3) in your text, you first write the text “This relation is shown in
Equation (”. Instead of typing now the number 3, you click Insert > Reference > Cross-
reference... and the Cross-reference dialogue box in Figure 4.21 appears.
Figure 4.21 The Cross-reference dialogue box.
Now you will refer to the bookmark with name Definition_of_c and insert in the text the value
of this bookmark, being the field code 3. The settings to do this, are shown in Figure 4.22.
You select the option Bookmark in the drop-down list Reference type: and you choose the
option Bookmark text in the drop-down list Insert reference to: on the right side. You confirm
by clicking the Insert button.
Figure 4.22 Settings in the Cross-reference dialogue box to refer to the bookmark Definition_of_c.
The result is shown in Figure 4.23. The grey color of the number 3 in the text indicates that
this is a field code as well.
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Figure 4.23 Result of the cross-reference to the bookmark Definition_of_c.
When you move Equation (3) and its preceding text now in front of the two other equations
again, and you select all text and update all fields, the result of Figure 4.24 is shown. The
Equation which defines ‘c’, is renumbered to (1) and the cross-reference in the preceding text
is also changed to Equation (1).
If you press <Alt>+<F9> to show the field codes (see Figure 4.25), you see that the cross-
reference to the bookmark name Definition_of_c makes use of the field code REF.
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Figure 4.24 Updating the field codes of equation numbers and cross-reference to bookmark.
Figure 4.25 REF field code to insert a cross-reference.
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Although the use of these field codes and bookmarks is a very powerful tool, it might still
seem somewhat laborious to work with them. We will see later that these procedures on their
turn can be automated by using macros to insert field codes and bookmarks with one mouse
click.
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4.3. USING CAPTIONS AND CROSS-REFERENCING FOR FIGURES
AND TABLES
The first topic that we discussed, were styles, and the second one were field codes and
bookmarks. This topic combines both previous topics to automatically number figures and
tables and add cross-references in your text.
In a report, article, thesis, etc., every figure and table has a label, a number and a caption
(descriptive text). MS Word has an automatic function to insert all three features together.
Therefore you click Insert > Reference > Caption... The Caption dialogue box in Figure 4.26
is opened. By default, the caption has the label Figure and the automatic number ‘1’.
Figure 4.26 The Caption dialogue box.
You can change the label to any text you like (e.g. My own figure), and by clicking the
Numbering... button, you can change the settings for the numbering. If you accept the default
settings, the caption Figure 1 is inserted in your text, as shown in Figure 4.27. Two important
things must be noticed:
(i) the number ‘1’, following the label Figure, has a grey background color. That means that
this number is a field code. Indeed, if you press <Alt>+<F9>, the field code
{ SEQ Figure \* ARABIC }
is shown. This SEQ field code looks already familiar and differs in nothing from the SEQ
field code discussed in the previous topic about field codes and bookmarks.
(ii) the paragraph style has changed from Normal to Caption. This Caption paragraph style is
a built-in paragraph style which is assigned by default to all captions. You can modify
this Caption paragraph style by adding additional tab stop positions or formatting marks
(bold, italic, point size, etc.).
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Figure 4.27 Inserting the default caption Figure 1 into your text.
To refer to this Figure 1, MS Word uses a cross-reference. You click Insert > Reference >
Cross-reference... and the Cross-reference dialogue box appears. This dialogue box is exactly
the same as the one we used in Figure 4.22 to add a cross-reference to a bookmark. In this
case we want to refer to a figure, so you select the option Figure in the drop-down list
Reference type: and you choose the option Only label and number in the drop-down list Insert
reference to: on the right side. These settings are shown in Figure 4.28.
Figure 4.28 Settings for inserting a cross-reference to a figure caption.
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If you click the Insert button, the result should look like Figure 4.29. Again the cross-
reference text Figure 1 has a grey background, which means that it is also a field code. If you
press <Alt>+<F9>, you will see that this is a REF field, just as the cross-reference in Figure
4.25.
Figure 4.29 Result of inserting a cross-reference to Figure 1.
Why would you use now these captions and cross-references ? If you insert new figures in
front of this Figure 1, the numbering of the figures and the cross-referencing can be updated
automatically. For example, insert two new Figure captions in front of the existing caption
Figure 1. You will see that the number of the original Figure 1 is automatically updated to
number 3. You would probably expect that also the cross-reference in the text is automatically
updated, but that is not the case. The result looks like Figure 4.30. The reason is that not all
field codes are automatically updated all the time. So to update the cross-reference as well,
you have to select the whole document (<Ctrl>+<a>) and update all fields (<F9>). Now you
will see that the cross-reference text changes from Figure 1 to Figure 3.
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Figure 4.30 Result after inserting two new Figure captions in front of the original Figure 1.
If you want to remember only one tip from this chapter, choose this tip and apply at least this
automatic use of captions and cross-references for your figures and tables. This feature saves
you a lot of time if you start cutting and pasting figures to different locations in your text.
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4.4. USING PAGE BREAKS AND SECTION BREAKS
Page breaks and section breaks are easy tools to enforce a certain page layout.
A page break enforces the text to continue on the next page. You can easily insert a page
break with the shortcut key <Ctrl>+<Enter> or by clicking Insert > Break... > Page break.
An example is shown in Figure 4.31. Here again, the benefit of showing all formatting marks
is demonstrated (see Figure 4.1). The formatting mark Page break is clearly shown, but if you
choose to hide all formatting marks, it can be very difficult to understand why these two
paragraphs do not want to close up together.
A page break can be useful to force pictures to be on top of a page, or to start a new heading
level on a new page.
Figure 4.31 Inserting a page break between two pages.
A more stringent break is a section break. By inserting section breaks (Insert > Break... >
Section break), you split up your document in two or more sections. You can use sections to
vary the layout of a document within a page or between pages. Just insert section breaks to
divide the document into sections, and then format each section the way you want. For
example, format a section as a single column for the introduction of a report, and then format
the following section as two columns for the report’s body text, as illustrated in Figure 4.32.
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Figure 4.32 Inserting section breaks.
You can change all the following formats of a section independently from other sections:
margins,
paper size or orientation,
paper source for a printer,
page borders,
vertical alignment,
headers and footers,
columns,
page numbering,
line numbering,
footnotes and endnotes.
As you see, a section break is also a great solution to include a page with portrait orientation
between pages with landscape orientation.
Keep in mind that a section break controls the section formatting of the text that precedes it.
For example, if you delete a section break, the preceding text becomes part of the following
section and assumes its section formatting. Note that the last paragraph mark in the document
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controls the section formatting of the last section in the document — or of the entire
document if it does not contain sections.
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4.5. USING HEADERS, FOOTERS AND PAGE NUMBERING
A header, which can consist of text or graphics, appears at the top of every page in a section.
A footer appears at the bottom of every page. Headers and footers often contain page
numbers, chapter titles, dates, and author names.
The combined use of headers and footers with section breaks is very useful for larger
documents. For example, in the beginning of your document, you have a table of contents,
where the page numbering in the footer is in lower case Roman numerals (i, ii, iii, ...) and the
header has the running title Table of Contents. After the table of contents, you have the first
chapter, where the page numbering in the footer is in arabic numbers (1, 2, 3, ...) and the
header has the running title Chapter 1.
To realize this example, you first define the header and footer for the Table of Contents. Click
View > Header and Footer, so that the Header and Footer toolbar appears, as shown in
Figure 4.33. By default, the header is shown for editing, but with the 4th button from the right
on the Header and Footer toolbar, you can switch between the header and footer.
Figure 4.33 Header and Footer toolbar.
Now you can insert the running title Table of Contents in the header, for example italic, right
aligned and with a line under it (with the Drawing toolbar). The result can look like Figure
4.34.
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Figure 4.34 Layout of the header for the Table of Contents.
Next you switch to the footer and insert the page number for automatic page numbering. This
is the 2nd button from the left on the Header and Footer toolbar, as shown in Figure 4.35.
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Figure 4.35 Inserting an automatic page number in the footer.
If you select the inserted page number and click on the 4th button from the left on the Header
and Footer toolbar (see Figure 4.36), you can format the page number and the numbering
style.
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Figure 4.36 Formatting the automatic page number in the footer.
The Page Number Format dialogue box appears, as shown in Figure 4.37.
Figure 4.37 Page Number Format dialogue box for formatting the automatic page numbers.
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Here the power of using styles and section breaks, is proved again. You can choose to include
the chapter number automatically. If you select this option, MS Word will detect the chapter
number from the style that you have defined for the chapter titles (e.g. Heading 1). Further
you can choose to start the page numbering at a specific number or continue from the
previous section.
In this case, we choose lower case Roman numerals (i, ii, iii,...) for the Table of Contents.
Now, you insert a section break between the last page of the Table of Contents and the first
page of Chapter 1. Then you navigate to the first page of Chapter 1 and you open the Header
and Footer toolbar again. As you can see on Figure 4.38, the content of the header and footer
of the previous section (Table of Contents), is automatically replicated in the current section
(Chapter 1). This is the default option.
However, because you have created a new section, you can decouple the header and footer of
this section from the header and footer of the previous section.
Figure 4.38 Changing the header and footer for the next section.
Therefore you deselect the 5th button from the right on the Header and Footer toolbar, as
shown in Figure 4.39. This button determines if the header/footer is linked to the previous
header/footer. You can remove this link only for the header, only for the footer, or for both.
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Once you have removed the link for the header, you can change the running title into
Chapter 1. Similarly, you can change the numbering style to arabic numbers (1, 2, 3,...) in the
footer and restart the page numbering at ‘1’.
Figure 4.39 Removing the link to the previous header and the currently active header.
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4.6. AUTOMATICALLY GENERATING A TABLE OF CONTENTS
If you make use of heading styles for numbering chapters, sections, subsections, etc. and of
automatic page numbering for the different sections, then generating a table of contents is a
piece of cake.
Click Insert > Reference > Index and Tables... to open the Index and Tables dialogue box.
Next, you click on the Table of Contents tab and the dialogue box in Figure 4.40 appears.
Figure 4.40 The Index and Tables dialogue box.
As you see, MS Word uses by default the Heading styles 1, 2 and 3 for generating the table of
contents and automatically includes the page numbers. You can do much more:
you can select different formats for the layout of the table of contents,
you can increase or decrease the number of levels that are included in the table of contents
(default is 3). If you choose for example 5, then paragraphs and subparagraphs with
Heading 4 and Heading 5 style are also indexed in the table of contents,
you can build a table of contents based on your own styles. If you click on the Options...
button in the right bottom corner, the Table of Contents Options dialogue box is opened, as
shown in Figure 4.41(left). If you remove the number 1 to 3 from Heading 1, Heading 2
and Heading 3, and you assign these numbers to different styles, for example the user-
defined styles doc_chapter, doc_kop1, doc_kop2, doc_kop3 and doc_kop4, as shown in
Figure 4.41(right), then these styles will be used to build up the hierarchy of the table of
contents.
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Figure 4.41 Changing the styles for generating the table of contents.
If we go back to the example of Figure 4.2 and we include page numbering in the footer, we
can generate a table of contents. Using all default settings, the table of contents will look like
Figure 4.42.
As you clearly see in Figure 4.42, the table of contents has a grey background color, which
means that it is in fact a field code. Indeed, if you toggle the field code with <Alt>+<F9>, you
will see the following field code:
{ TOC \o “1-3” \h \z \u }
If you look up the help information for the field code TOC, you can find what all the different
switches mean (search for keywords “field codes TOC”).
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Figure 4.42 Automatically generated table of contents.
Finally, it can happen that you want to transfer the table of contents to a separate file. If you
do that, all the linked information that this field code needs to build up the table of contents, is
lost. That is why you need first to transform the field code into regular text. Therefore you
select the table of contents text and then press <Ctrl>+<Shift>+<F9>. Then you will see the
text as shown in Figure 4.43.
You might not have expected that the text would turn blue and underlined, but this is a
consequence of the fact that you used the default option Use hyperlinks instead of page
numbers when creating the table of contents (see Figure 4.40). If you do not select this check
box, the field code will convert to regular text.
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Figure 4.43 Converting the TOC field code to regular text.
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4.7. USING MACROS FOR AUTOMATIC NUMBERING OF EQUATIONS
If you are not yet convinced of using all the features discussed above, you can make it even
more faster and combine the different actions for generating field codes and inserting cross-
references into one single macro. A macro is an action or a set of actions that you can use to
automate tasks. When you record a macro, you perform a series of actions in MS Word and
MS Word converts this sequence into an executable program written in the Visual Basic for
Applications (VBA) programming language. Although you can edit this program code with the
Visual Basic Editor, you do not need any programming skills to record and execute macro’s.
You can execute the macro by clicking a newly defined button on the toolbar or by pressing a
newly defined shortcut key.
In this section, we will create a macro which combines several topics we learnt in the
previous paragraphs. The macro Insert_centered_equation will execute by clicking one single
button on the toolbars and will insert a centered equation with a right aligned automatically
generated equation number. The following actions must be performed:
- assign the paragraph style Centered_equation (see Figure 4.6 and Figure 4.7)
- jump to the right aligned tab at the right margin
- insert the SEQ field code to number the equation automatically
- start the Microsoft Equation Editor at the centered tab position.
In this way, we can insert centered and automatically numbered equations in our articles,
reports, theses, etc.
In order to record this macro properly, it is easier if the Microsoft Equation Editor does not
open inline in the document by default, but opens in a separate dialogue window. You can
enforce this by changing the variable ForceOpen in the registry keys for the Microsoft
Equation Editor.
If you have never used Microsoft Equation Editor before, you should first invoke the equation
editor once, so that the registry settings for this software are activated. Start up MS Word and
insert a new equation by clicking Insert > Object... The Object dialogue box in Figure 4.44
appears. Select the Microsoft Equation 3.0 object from the Object type: drop-down list.
Figure 4.44 The Object dialogue box.
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If you click the OK button, the Microsoft Equation Editor window opens inline. If you close
down the window again without inserting any equation, you will see that a grey box is
remaining in your text, because an equation is again nothing more than a field code. You can
just delete this grey box again.
Now shut down the MS Word program completely. Next click on the Start button in the
bottom left corner of your Windows desktop screen and choose the command Run... from the
Start menu. The Run dialogue box in Figure 4.45 appears. Type the command ‘regedt32’ in
the Open: text box and click the OK button.
Figure 4.45 Start ‘regedt32.exe’ in the Run dialogue box.
The Registry Editor dialogue window in Figure 4.46 opens.
Figure 4.46 The Registry Editor dialogue window.
Navigate to:
My Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Equation Editor\3.0\Options\General
and change the value of the variable ForceOpen from ‘0’ to ‘1’ (you can also do a search for
the text string “forceopen”).
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If you open Microsoft Word again and insert a new equation, the equation editor will open in
a separate window, as shown in Figure 4.47.
Figure 4.47 The Microsoft Equation Editor window.
Let us now move to the macro recording. Click Tools > Macro > Record New Macro... to
record a new macro. The Record Macro dialogue box in Figure 4.48 appears.
Figure 4.48 The Record Macro dialogue box.
First enter the name Insert_centered_equation in the Macro name: text box. Now you can
choose to assign the command for executing the macro to a newly defined button on one of
the toolbars or to a newly defined shortcut key on the keyboard.
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If you choose for the toolbars, the Customize dialogue box in Figure 4.49 appears.
Figure 4.49 The Customize dialogue box.
You click on the command Normal.NewMacros.Insert_centered_equation with the left mouse
button and you drag the command to one of the toolbars on top of your document. You only
release the left mouse button when the button is inserted at the toolbar position that you want.
By default, the button has the name of the macro, which makes the button very long. To
change this, you can right-click on the button and the drop-down list in Figure 4.50 appears.
Choose Default Style to show only the button and not the text. You can also choose a new
icon with the command Change Button Image. It is best to customize the appearance of the
button immediately, because after the recording of the macro, the right-click on the button
does not work anymore. Then you need the change the appearance of the button through the
menu Tools > Customize...
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Figure 4.50 Customizing the newly defined button on the toolbar to execute the macro.
If you want to assign your new macro to a keyboard shortcut, you have to choose a shortcut
key. Most combinations of <Alt> and a letter are not used by MS Word itself.
After you have assigned a toolbar button or a shortcut key to your new macro, the macro
recording starts and the <Pause> and <Stop> button appear on the Macro docking toolbar, as
shown in Figure 4.51. Also the mouse pointer changes to the symbol of a tape recorder.
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Figure 4.51 Start recording a new macro.
Before you record a macro, you can better practice the sequence of actions that you want to
record. For this macro we will record the following list of actions which should be reproduced
exactly:
the cursor is on the left side of a line,
assign the paragrah style Centered_equation (see Figure 4.6 and Figure 4.7),
press the <Tab> key twice,
insert a opening bracket “(“,
press <Ctrl>+<F9> to insert a field code,
write “SEQ equation”,
click <F9> to update the active field code,
press the <End> key to move to the end of the line,
insert a closing bracket “)”,
press the <Home> key to move to the beginning of the line,
press the right arrow on your keyboard once to move to the position of the centering tab,
open the menu Insert, Object... and select the “Microsoft Equation editor 3.0”,
shut down the Microsoft Equation Editor,
stop recording the macro.
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This complete sequence of actions is recorded into a small Visual Basic for Applications
program and every time that you click the new button on the toolbar or press the shortcut key,
this program is executed.
If you are interested to know more about your recorded macro code in Visual Basic for
Applications, you can edit the code by clicking Tools, Macro, Macros..., choosing your macro
and clicking the Edit button. The corresponding code is shown in Figure 4.52.
Figure 4.52 Editing the macro program code in the Visual Basic Editor.
If you are familiar with programming in the Visual Basic for Applications language, you can
add a lot more features to this code. For example you can implement a pop-up dialogue box to
ask the reader for a bookmark name. That bookmark name is then assigned to the equation
number with the code:
{ SEQ Identifier Bookmark Switches }
e.g. { SEQ equation Definition_of_c \* ARABIC }
Then you can insert cross-references to the equation number very easily.
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4.8. SOLVING LAYOUT ISSUES
This section shortly discusses a few layout issues that can be helpful when structuring a
document.
4.8.1. Aligning lists and paragraphs
Inserting leading and trailing spaces is still a widely used technique to align lists or
paragraphs. This method is quite bad, because as soon as the font size or the number of words
changes, the width of the leading or trailing spaces changes.
Therefore the best solution is to use tab stops. A tab stop is a location on the horizontal ruler
that indicates how far to indent text or where to begin a column of text. There are five
different tab stops:
You can change the type of tab stop on the leftmost side of the horizontal ruler, as shown in
Figure 4.53.
Figure 4.53 Selecting the type of tab stop (left, centre, right, decimal or bar).
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Next you put a tab stop by just clicking a location on the horizontal ruler. This tab stop will be
active for all new paragraphs that are created after the current one.
If you want to set a tab stop at a precise location, it is better to use the Tabs dialogue box by
clicking Format, Tabs... For example, you can set a tab stop at positions 2, 6 and 10 cm, as
shown in Figure 4.54.
Figure 4.54 Setting tab stops at precise locations.
When you would now insert a list with the twelve months of the year, you can align them
very easily, as shown in Figure 4.55.
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Figure 4.55 Aligning lists with tab stops.
These tab stops are also very useful for aligning paragraphs. To that purpose, you combine the
tab stops with the First line indent marker or the right indent marker. These markers are the
two triangles pointing to each other in the left margin of the horizontal ruler, as indicated in
Figure 4.56.
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Figure 4.56 First line indent marker and Right indent marker on the horizontal ruler.
For example, if you want to list three arguments for your reasoning, you define a tab stop at
1.0 cm and you drag the Right indent marker (the lower triangle) until it coincides with the tab
stop position. This means that all lines of every next paragraph must be indented to the first
tab position. The example is illustrated in Figure 4.57.
You can use the combination of tab stops and indent markers also to nicely align the captions
of different figures, as illustrated in Figure 4.58.
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Figure 4.57 Indenting paragraphs with the Right indent marker and a tab stop.
Figure 4.58 Aligning the captions of different figures with the Right indent marker and a tab stop.
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4.8.2. Formatting tabular data
In the previous paragraph, it was already illustrated that you can align a list of data very easily
with tab stops. If you have a longer list of tabular data, the best way to format them is using
tables. This sounds very logical, but still many people align tabular data with a lot of leading
or trailing spaces.
The best way to start, is to insert an empty table that has as many columns as the maximum
number of columns that appears in any row, and as many rows as the maximum number of
rows that appear in any column. After that, you can use the Table > Merge cells command to
combine several cells in one row or one column.
An example of a table for a project planning is shown in Figure 4.59.
Task description Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4
Task 1 1.1 1.2
Task 2
2.1 2.1 2.3 2.4
Task 3
3.1 3.2
Task 4
4.1 4.2 4.3
Figure 4.59 Example of a table for a project planning, using Merge cells to combine different cells.
4.8.3. Formatting figures
When combining several pictures or graphs in one figure, tables are again very useful to
properly align them. For example, you want to show a sequence of four images in one figure.
First you define a table with two rows and four columns (Table > Insert > Table...). Next you
insert the four images in the first row. In the second row, you center the labels (a), (b), (c) and
(d).
Finally, you open the Borders and Shading dialogue box with the command Format >
Borders and Shading... Under the Borders tab, you select the setting “None” and in the
bottom right corner, you select “Apply to: Table”, as shown in Figure 4.60.
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Figure 4.60 Hiding the table borders when aligning different images in one figure.
In that way, the table borders will be invisible when you print the document. The result looks
like Figure 4.61.
(a) (b) (c) (d)
Figure 4.61 Example of aligning different pictures with a table.
4.8.4. Creating charts
In case of charts representing a large set of measurement data, Microsoft Excel is not the ideal
charting software. For example, if you present different curves on one chart in Excel, you will
typically use symbols like ▲, ▼, ○, ●, ◊, etc. to distinguish between the different curves (you
could also think of using different colours, but in case of a publication, the reproduction costs
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for colour graphs are extremely expensive (up till 2500 EUR for one publication)). Excel will
plot a symbol for every data point, which makes the graph look very messy if you have a large
data set. In more advanced charting software, you can choose to plot a symbol only every five
or ten data points. Also the resolution of the graphs can be much better in professional
charting software.
Ghent University has a campus license for the scientific charting software Sigmaplot
(http://www.systat.com/products/sigmaplot/). You can use it through Athena or download it
from the Ghent University software server.
Another widely used charting software is Origin (http://www.originlab.com/). Also Matlab
can be used to create scientific charts.
4.8.5. Formatting equations
The Microsoft Word equation editor is frequently considered as a rudimentary editor for
mathematical equations, especially by the LaTeX community. Unfortunately, most users of
the Microsoft Word equation editor do not fully exploit the capabilities of this editor.
For example, one of the major headaches is to nicely align different equations, but as shown
in the example equation below, you can solve this issue also with the Microsoft Word
equation editor.
4125
2
12123
12
122121
12
2242252
22223
3
22
222221
224225
2
22223
22
222221
22
1141152
11113
3
11
112111
114115
2
11113
11
112111
11
exp1exp
0exp1exp
0exp1exp
0exp1exp
0exp1exp
3
3
ccDcD
ccdN
dD
ifcc
DcD
cc
ifccDcD
cc
dN
dD
ifcc
DcD
cc
ifccDcD
cc
dN
dD
Here again, tables (or equivalent ‘matrices’ in the Microsoft Word Equation Editor) are very
powerful to correctly align all terms in the equations.
First you start by inserting a new equation in your document. The Microsoft Word Equation
Editor opens (as previously shown in Figure 4.47) and you insert a matrix with five rows and
three columns in the Equation Editor (the matrix palette is the last button on the toolbar), as
shown in Figure 4.62.
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Figure 4.62 Inserting a matrix in the Equation editor.
Figure 4.63 shows the partially filled matrix. By using the matrix layout, the “=” signs are
already aligned, there is some vertical spacing between the three differential equations and the
vertical bars for the third cell of the first and third row are already inserted.
Figure 4.63 Partially completed matrix for aligning the three differential equations.
Now, precisely in this third cell of the first and third row (the ones with the vertical bar), you
insert a sub-matrix with two rows and three columns, as shown in Figure 4.64.
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Figure 4.64 Inserting a sub-matrix in one cell of the matrix.
Figure 4.65 shows the further completion of the matrix layout.
Figure 4.65 Further completion of the matrix with the equations.
Finally, all terms of the equations are filled in and you can add some standardized horizontal
spacing in the third columns to separate the vertical bars from the subsequent equations, as
shown in Figure 4.66.
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Figure 4.66 Adding some standardized horizontal spacing between the vertical bars and the equations.
4.8.6. Grouping or splitting words
If you want two words to keep together and not to be broken up on two lines, you can insert a
nonbreaking space with <Ctrl>+<Shift>+<Spacebar>.
For example:
Without inserting a nonbreaking space between “item” and “1”, the term “Research item 1” will be broken up just before the number 1. By inserting now a nonbreaking space between “item” and “1”, the term “Research item 1” will never be broken up just before the number.
This is particularly useful if you use a space to separate the thousands in a large number. The
number 3 000 000 (three million) should not be broken up on two different lines.
On the other hand, if you insert a hyphen (-) in a word and this word is at the end of the line,
MS Word will break up the word at the position of the hyphen. You can prevent this by insert
a nonbreaking hyphen (<Ctrl>+<Shift>+<->).
For some words in foreign languages, MS Word does not know where to split up the word
correctly. Therefore you can insert an optional hyphen (<Ctrl>+<->) where MS Word is
allowed to split up the word if necessary.
4.8.7. Using MS Word newsgroups
In Chapter 2, the use of newsgroups was discussed as a helpful tool for solving practical
problems with software. For MS Word in particular, there exist a lot of newsgroups. The list
is shown below.
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microsoft.public.word
microsoft.public.word.application.* (1)
microsoft.public.word.applicationerrors
microsoft.public.word.conversions
microsoft.public.word.customization.* (1)
microsoft.public.word.docmanagement
microsoft.public.word.dos
microsoft.public.word.drawing.* (1)
microsoft.public.word.drawing-graphics
microsoft.public.word.formatting.* (1)
microsoft.public.word.formattinglongdocs
microsoft.public.word.general
microsoft.public.word.international.* (1)
microsoft.public.word.internet.* (1)
microsoft.public.word.internetassistant
microsoft.public.word.mail
microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.* (1)
microsoft.public.word.mailmergefields
microsoft.public.word.newusers
microsoft.public.word.numbering
microsoft.public.word.oleinterop
microsoft.public.word.pagelayout
microsoft.public.word.printingfonts
microsoft.public.word.programming
microsoft.public.word.setup.* (1)
microsoft.public.word.setupnetworking
microsoft.public.word.spelling.* (1)
microsoft.public.word.spelling-grammar
microsoft.public.word.tables
microsoft.public.word.vba.* (6)
microsoft.public.word.web.* (1)
microsoft.public.word.wordbasic
As explained in Chapter 2, you can access these newsgroups through the news server
news.UGent.be or through the website http://groups.google.com/.
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