Monthly Archives: December 2009

Overcoming barriers: access to research information

09 Wednesday Dec 2009

Posted by in How to improve academic search, Official and think-tank reports

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Two new December 2009 reports from the UK’s prolific RIN, part of a cluster of five such reports…

1) Overcoming barriers: access to research information (PDF link)…

“This report finds that many researchers are encountering difficulties in getting access to the content they need and that this is having a significant impact on their research.”

“technical limitations such as log in/authentication problems (26%) or problems with proxy servers and off-site access (a particular problem for researchers [seeking to access ejournals] – a majority in the humanities and social sciences – who spend significant amounts of time away from their home institution)”

“The proportions of those who felt the impact [of unavailable ejournal content] as having a ‘significant’ impact on their research were higher in the arts and humanities“

2) How researchers secure access to licensed content not immediately available to them (DOC link, Word)…

“emailing the author directly […] creative searching online, primarily using Google Books and Google Scholar […] accessing cached content; and signing up for free trials with publishers […] buying books online, usually second-hand, when they are unable to get access via other routes.”

   [ Hat-tip: Open Access News ]

Widescreen search results

08 Tuesday Dec 2009

Posted by in How to improve academic search, JURN tips and tricks

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In an age of 24″ widescreen monitors, why do many people stick with a long scrolling page format for search results — more suited to the age of the accounting ledger?

When the results could look like this…

How? Here’s my recipe:

The Firefox web browser, with the GreaseMonkey addon. Then add the Google 100 GreaseMonkey script, and set it to show 24 results per search page. Add the GoogleMonkeyR script, and set it up to show three columns (and to remove clutter such as “Related searches” and “Sponsored Links”).

You’ll never scroll on search-results again.

I’m assuming you already have AdBlock Plus installed on Firefox, to remove all Google text ads. The GreaseMonkey script New Google Ad-block may also be of interest, to block the page-integrated ads that Google is now adding to results.

Google Scholar H-Index for Greasemonkey

08 Tuesday Dec 2009

Posted by in How to improve academic search, JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news

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A new Firefox + Greasemonkey script: Google Scholar H-Index…

“This rough, yet useful, Firefox GreaseMonkey script will enable you to automatically display some of the most known citation indices (h-index, g-index, e-index) for any author queried on Google Scholar. […] The script currently processes just the displayed result page, and, as such, does not currently work for persons having enormous (h or g)-index (h or g > 100).”

I have to admit I’m not entirely sure how such measures work. But I assume that ‘more is better’ in terms of the starting citations needed to take a measurement. So possibly someone will hack it so that it works through 1000 search results, rather than the current 100?

Another new script of interest is Google Scholar Citation Explorer…

“An enhancement for Google Scholar that lets you see which citations a set of papers have in common. Select a group of related papers, even from across searches, and see which papers cite the whole set (or a subset of it).”

Anonymous Google CSEs

07 Monday Dec 2009

Posted by in JURN's Google watch, Spotted in the news

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There’s a newly released Firefox addon, called Google Custom Search 1.1.2 and made by Kai Londenberg. It creates independently-hosted anonymous Google CSEs, which you can manage and refine from your Google search results / browser. Although it uses the Google API, your engine’s data appears to be stored anonymously on a server in Europe…

“A Google Account is not required anymore, Custom Search Engines can be stored anonymously on quicksear.ch”

Basically, using this addon gives you a seamless melding of the normal Google results format with the major configuration possibilities of a CSE. It’s Google’s SearchWiki on steroids, in an exo-skeleton.

But I don’t see any way to backup your CSE’s XML annotations file of URLs, which means it would be rather risky to invest large amounts of time building a subject-specific CSE this way, rather than using Google’s own interface. Perhaps a backup option will appear once the quicksear.ch site goes live — the addon and service are currently very new, having seemingly been live since September.

There’s no way to upload a “big list ‘o URLs” in the traditional manner, and have them automatically boosted in the CSE’s search rankings. Your CSE is currently a “add one URL at a time” job, as you surf the search results day in and day out. Which perhaps gives your CSE some interesting anti-spam/anti-SEO features, if your CSE is to be used as a mass collaborative anonymous engine (which it apparently can be — tick “accept volunteer contributions” when creating your CSE). And it doesn’t seem to include Google Books results, even when you tell it to include them and boost their rating by 100%.

You currently lose Google’s new “Options…” sidebar, when searching via your quicksear.ch CSE addon (which appears along with the others, in Firefox’s top-right mini search box).

Just like the official Google CSEs, you get cut-and-paste HTML code, which lets others try out your CSE without needing to log in or install anything. I created a new experimental CSE titled JURN collaborative, with permissions for collaborators, but how collaborators contribute to it is currently a mystery.

    Update: it seems that to collaborate you would have to share your quicksear.ch password with your collaborators.

Auto-detect language and auto-translate – all browsers should do this

07 Monday Dec 2009

Posted by in How to improve academic search, JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news

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This is rather nice, and seems to have been released in the last few days. A new Chinese Language translation add-on for Firefox, where the language of the web page is auto-detected and the translation happens seamlessly within the existing page layout. There’s no messing around with tedious right-clicking, highlighting, hovering over buttons, etc. This is one of the first of many such add-ons, I would hope. Future browsers should have this built in, for all the major languages.

The only problem at present it that it’s rather too seamless. Users need a little visual flag to show when it’s been applied to a page. And perhaps a “toggle” button.