22 Monday Jun 2009
Posted in JURN blogged
Film Studies for Free blog has kindly added a JURN search-box on the sidebar…
If you’d like to do the same, just copy and paste this code.
Sadly, the idiot-bots at Wikipedia don’t share Film Studies for Free‘s enthusiasm, and think JURN is spam.
22 Monday Jun 2009
Posted in Academic search, JURN's Google watch
Following my own group-test, it’s interesting to see that Peter at Gale Reference Review has just published a detailed May 2009 review of three major academic search-engines. He takes a skeptical look at Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and Google Scholar. The article is rather long, but here are some interesting quotes…
“Google Scholar […] reports implausibly high citedness counts for most items, which becomes quite obvious when tracing the purportedly citing papers”
“I looked at the widely touted figures in the promotional materials [ of WoS and Scopus and found ] they should not be taken for granted. Many of these are incorrect and exaggerated. Their compilation has been fast and loose, sometimes making them fiction rather than fact.”
“The coverage of arts & humanities [ in Scopus ] is extremely poor (representing barely 1% of the database) [ and by comparison ] Web of Science has about […] 10 times as many for arts & humanities.” [ and even if Scopus gets a boost, as proposed, it would still only have ] about 1/6th of what Web of Science has for these disciplines”
“It is one thing that Scopus has no cited references in records for papers published before 1996, but it adds insult to injury that the pre-1996 papers are ignored. This results in absurdly low h-index for many of the senior teaching and research faculty members and independent researchers who published papers well before 1996 which have been widely cited in the past 25-35 years […] Lazy administrators and bureaucrats stop here and ignore [ worthy people ] for some lifetime award”
21 Sunday Jun 2009
If there was a Firefox addon that converted URLs to icons…
There isn’t, sadly. 🙂 < of course, as you can see here, WordPress already has similar functionality — replacing a text-smiley with an icon.
21 Sunday Jun 2009
Posted in Economics of Open Access
The End of Institutional Repositories & the Beginning of Social Academic Research Service (16th June 2009)…
“Is it not possible for IRs [ repositories ] to serve as full-fledged electronic libraries and thereby serve the greater purpose of collecting, disseminating, analyzing and exchanging useful digital information for academic purposes? Should not the IR be coupled with the full range of academic and research support services that new technologies permit? […] The challenge, as I see it, is to keep librarians from undermining themselves. […] IRs can be utilized in far more creative ways to enhance the research endeavor.”
Although one might compare such aspirations with the view from the trenches, as expressed in Innkeeper at the Roach Motel…
“Academic librarianship has not supported repositories or their managers. Most libraries consistently under-resource and understaff repositories, further worsening the participation gap. Software and services have been wildly out of touch with faculty needs and the realities of repository management.”
20 Saturday Jun 2009
Have you ever wanted to rip all the PDF and DOC files from a focussed Google or Google Scholar search, quickly save them all to a folder, index them with something powerful like dtSearch, and then search the real full-text from across all of them — rather than whatever bits the Googlebot indexed as it swept past, and whatever bits the Google Search ran its search from?
Or archive the entire run of a PDF ejournal that’s sitting at site:www.our-ejournal/articles/ ?
The new free OutWit Docs Firefox plugin does that, and works with the latest version of Firefox. There’s one major drawback — it hijacks the space right next to your browser’s Home icon, with a naff shiny 3D-stylee icon…
Unacceptable. It can however be moved after a bit of fiddling (Right-click, ‘customize’, and drag it out) and then placed somewhere a little more suitable and out-of-sight.
When using it, though, you also quickly come to appreciate why people should name their academic PDF files something_meaningful.pdf rather than xy2f6fjg00.pdf And why filenames should have year rather than month first…
As a severe test of what after all is a mere 0.1.0.20 app, it took 9 minutes to whisk through 90 years worth of Field Artillery journal (1911-2007), running from a Google search of site:sill-www.army.mil/FAMAG/ , to find 800Mb in 996 PDF files, and to then start to download them. This was, of course, the point at which I wanted OutWit to have a big red STOP button, although quitting the app did the trick.
20 Saturday Jun 2009
Posted in JURN tips and tricks
Here’s a useful way to extend the functionality of the JURN Firefox addon. The addon Site Search 1.5 puts a new green icon next to your normal blue one…
…and clicking on the green icon searches the contents of the site you’re at. If you’re searching JURN and can see your starting article, then you’re assured that JURN indexes the URL where it’s kept.
Site Search 1.5 is new (May 2009) and works in the latest version of Firefox. It also adds functionality to the right-click menu when highlighting phrases in pages…
Update: January 2010. Seems to have vanished from the web. Try this (less elegant) addon instead. If you also run GreaseMonkey in Firefox, also try this script.
20 Saturday Jun 2009
Posted in Spotted in the news
I’m partial to ‘feature-length anything’ that touches on nerds. I just found a feature-length documentary I hadn’t known about, The Hollywood Librarian, a documentary about librarians. Despite being out on DVD it’s not listed on Amazon U.K. or U.S. — but can be purchased from a small educational foundation from between $275.00 (universities) to a more reasonable $24.95 (“home use”). A full-length low-quality watermarked copy is available free online.
20 Saturday Jun 2009
Posted in Economics of Open Access, Spotted in the news
“The use of citations to determine the quality of academic work in the hard sciences is to be abandoned in favour of peer review in the new system being designed to replace the research assessment exercise. […] the Higher Education Funding Council for England sketched out how it intends to assess the quality of research outputs in the system…”
20 Saturday Jun 2009
A new report titled Leading the World: The Economic Impact of UK Arts and Humanities Research (PDF link), from the Arts & Humanities Research Council…
“it appears that the UK arts and humanities community is producing nearly as many articles as their US colleagues (over three years, the UK produced 33% and the USA 37%), even though the USA has five times our population.”
Impressive productivity, which also seems to be reflected in citations. Let’s hope it convinces — it’s the sort of report that appears before an axe-weilding government Comprehensive Spending Review stomps onto the scene.
19 Friday Jun 2009
Posted in JURN tips and tricks
You can find the free JURN add-on for the popular Firefox web browser on this page.
Simply scroll down the page until you see JURN in the list. Handily, it’s located next to JSTOR UK…
After you install it, locate the small search box alongside your browser’s address bar. You should now be able to easily toggle between JURN and other engines, via a simple drop-down menu…
Choosing JURN in this way allows you to highlight and right-click on any phase in any web page, then have JURN do a search…
The set of results open in a new window.
That’s it! Thanks to Pattrice Jones for making the add-on.