Monthly Archives: December 2010

Seven new titles added

31 Friday Dec 2010

Posted by in New titles added to JURN

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New additions to the JURN index today:—

Jerusalem Quarterly

Quidditas : Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association

RAG, The (quarterly of the Roman Archaeology Group at UWA)

Virtual Archaeology Review

Aegis Humanities Journal (Otterbein University Humanities Journal)

Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (There doesn’t appear to be an index page)

Conversations on the Liberal Arts

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Feature articles of SAFE : Saving Antiquities for Everyone

Proceedings of the conference ‘Pecus : man and animal in antiquity’

Second half of the article-level checking done.

31 Friday Dec 2010

Posted by in My general observations, New titles added to JURN

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My software-assisted checking of JURN’s article-level index is now complete.

The process involved determining if each and every URL in the JURN index was still being “seen” and indexed by Google. In this second and final check, another 180 or so journals have had their URL re-found and corrected. I also adjusted the relevant Directory URL, when that was found to have changed. Another 20 dead or deleted journals have been removed. All this means that every URL in JURN’s main index is currently being indexed by Google.

I then did a quick Linkbot-based re-check of the resulting latest version of the JURN Directory, looking for and correcting any “404 not found” results.

I think I’ve now developed a fairly robust “pincer movement” method that can annually curtail the inevitable link-rot:— i) the article-level URL-checking; and ii) spam-word searches in JURN; and iii) the checks on the English-language Directory for “404” / redirected home-pages.

Three new titles

31 Friday Dec 2010

Posted by in New titles added to JURN

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Three new ejournal additions to JURN, found during the big link-checking:—

Electronic Journal of Mithraic Studies (Ancient Roman Mithraism)

Classics@ : an online journal (journal of the Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard. Added to the JURN Directory, but articles can’t be indexed by JURN — they have one of the most hideous URL structures I’ve ever seen, and on top of that there also seems to be per-session URL-shaping to prevent linking to individual pages. It’s Classics, guys — web traffic isn’t likely to be that heavy…)

APS Proceedings Online (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society)

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NordLit (Nordic literature. Formerly listed at a duplicate site that has issues to #22. This new site has issues to #25. Indexing at both sites).

Found an additional way to auto-check JURN

28 Tuesday Dec 2010

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks, My general observations, New titles added to JURN

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I’m pleased to say that I’ve found a robust way to auto-check if Google is still “seeing” content at the article-level URLs indexed by JURN. It’s a software based solution, and is basically ‘dark side’ SEO software that I’ve turned to the good side. It auto-prepends the site: modifier to each of the URLs contained in the JURN index, and then checks if those URLs are actually indexed by Google. It then logs any wholly un-indexed URLs. It just chugs away in the background and is very slow — so as not to trigger flood-control blocking measures. But it’s certainly better than doing the checking by hand.

If you have such a list you want to check, it’s probably best to remove or cut back any URLs containing multiple wildcards such as /*/*/. Google has also been known to choke on URLs containing question-marks (it can see them as evidence of someone trying a scripting exploit on Google), although I don’t see this happening during the checking. But if you’re doing the checking in blocks of 200, it’s not difficult to correct those sort of URLs first.

Spamming Google Scholar

22 Wednesday Dec 2010

Posted by in JURN's Google watch, Ooops!

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Spamming Google Scholar. Very possible, or so it seems…

“…we conducted several tests on Google Scholar. The results show that academic search engine spam is indeed – and with little effort – possible: We increased rankings of academic articles on Google Scholar by manipulating their citation counts; Google Scholar indexed invisible text we added to some articles, making papers appear for keyword searches the articles were not relevant for; Google Scholar indexed some nonsensical articles we randomly created with the paper generator SciGen; and Google Scholar linked to manipulated versions of research papers that contained a Viagra advertisement.”

Beel, J. (2010)
Academic Search Engine Spam and Google Scholar’s Resilience Against it.
Journal of Electronic Publishing 13 (3), December 2010.