National Academies Press with Academy Scope

National Academies Press publishes reports produced by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. These institutions provide leadership on challenging scientific issues by presenting information that informs and educates.

What do they publish?

The collection of over 5500 publications includes brief reports of less than 10 pages and comprehensive books of over 400 pages.

Many have an educational focus while others address public policy issues. New releases cover topics in sustainable agriculture, health literacy, and nuclear safety. Most books on this site are freely available to read online or to download in pdf.

Discovery

Find NAP books from discovery services including worldcat.org, or search directly from nap.edu. The prominent search box features keyword searching with filtering by topic or year. The site strength is its browsing functionality. Books are organized by topic, featured titles, new releases, and most downloaded. Selecting a topic such as earth science leads to 622 books on various issues such as climate intervention, flood insurance, and water resources. From a title screen one sees the abstract, table of contents, bonus multimedia resources, and options to download a free copy or read online.

Tip

AcademyScope, featured in the browse by topic window, offers a novel way to explore the collection. The benefit is the ability to discover related books from a visually intriguing and interactive display. This visualization connects titles in a networked web that grows and shrinks according to topical relationships of the selected book. From the sidebar the user can review title details. A graph by publication year is provided at the bottom of the screen.

Exploring National Academies Press through AcademyScope can be great for generating research paper topic ideas. Reports featured here have a strong scientific foundation plus valuable interdisciplinary connections.

More about AcademyScope from nap.edu: “AcademyScope was originally created by Indiana University’s Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center and was adapted for the web by Juan Thomassie.”

Note: The National Academy of Medicine , a new name effective July 1, 2015, represents the Institute of Medicine.

We welcome your comments and suggestions. If you have a resource that you would like to see highlighted please leave us a comment.

Jennifer Roach, Distance Learning & Resource Sharing Librarian, Towson University, jroach@towson.edu