All Things SSRN

Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a world wide collaborative of over 169,000 authors and more than 1.3 million users that is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research. It is composed of a number of specialized research networks in the social sciences. Each of SSRN's networks encourages the early distribution of research results by reviewing and distributing submitted abstracts and full text papers from scholars around the world. SSRN encourages readers to communicate directly with other subscribers and authors concerning their own and other's research.

SSRN supports the Open Access movement. All scholars may submit papers for free, and author-submitted content is downloadable at no charge by users world-wide.

SSRN is a network of networks, that is, it is divided into specialized areas including cognitive science, information systems, marketing, negotiations, poltical science, and social science. What you may not realize is SSRN includes the humanities as well (classics, English & American literature, and philosophy research networks).

If you are interested in submitting your own work to SSRN there are instructions on the site complete with a video demo.

But it gets even better because SSRN now has a very cool free app for iPhone and iPad users which enables you to search the Archive's over 260,000 papers (and growing) from anywhere. Papers can be emailed or viewed directely on your device. iPad users can download documents and annotate, etc. as well.

If you can't get enough of SSRN, you can also subscribe to their twitter feed (twitter @ ssrn) and their blog.

September CommQuote

This month's quote is from a t-shirt. From the September 12, 2011 issue of The New Yorker (page 75). The magazine is available to the Penn community electronically and also in paper in the Annenberg Library.

ASC Library Mobile

Good news for all comm junkies on the go...the Annenberg Library now has its own mobile access page.
Using this site you can check our hours, search Franklin and VCat, use the handy Penn Text article finder, or access Blackboard and RefWorks much more easily from your mobile devices. Just bookmark the site from the link on the Annenberg Library homepage. In addition, there's a mobile friendly app for EBSCOhosts databases which now not only includes Communication & Mass Media Complete, but also Communication Abstracts. Other mobile friendly databases to search on the train or a park bench are Lexis-Nexis Academic, Scopus, and for health communication folks, Medline Plus. The list of mobile friendly databases will no doubt be growing and I'll try to keep up with good ones to add. Notice too, that your favorite library blog, Commpilings, does not go unrepresented on the page, so no excuse for not being up on the latest (5) posts!