Monthly Archives: December 2010

Four more ejournals added today

14 Tuesday Dec 2010

Posted by in New titles added to JURN

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Added to the JURN site-index today:—

Journal of the Oxford University History Society

Chronicles of Oklahoma (Oklahoma history – full-text 1923 – 1962, thereafter TOCs only)

Trabalhos de Arqueologia (Portuguese, some articles in English – e.g.: “Portuguese-derived ship design methods in southern India?”)

Societas Magica Newsletter (Scholarly study of historical magic, with academic contributors and substantial articles)

Chinese journals

13 Monday Dec 2010

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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I seem to have missed out on mentioning a couple of recent articles on the state of ejournals in China:

1. An article from Nature, on China’s severe problems with academic journals…

“in a Correspondence to Nature last week, Yuehong Zhang of the Journal of Zhejiang University–Science reported that a staggering 31% of the papers submitted to that campus journal contained plagiarized material (Nature 467, 153; 2010).”

2. And a long article in the New York Times…

“The Lancet, the British medical journal, warned that faked or plagiarized research posed a threat to President Hu Jintao’s vow to make China a “research superpower” by 2020.”

“a recent government study in which a third of the 6,000 scientists at six of the nation’s top institutions admitted they had engaged in plagiarism or the outright fabrication of research data.”

As far as I know, no mainland Chinese journals are accessible via JURN, since the Chinese state requires them all to be kept on a central server in page-scanned image form only (i.e.: no Googleable text).

Google’s new ‘Advanced Reading Level’

10 Friday Dec 2010

Posted by in JURN's Google watch

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Google has implemented a new filter that allows the filtering of search results by ‘reading level’. It’s accessed via the Advanced Search page, thus…

In a search for the term “reading level”, with the Reading Level set to Advanced, I still had a basic About.com page in the first page of results, as well as this blatant SEO spam page as result No.8.

A search for ‘tolkien + symbols’ showed better results, with a solid and useful first two pages of results. Although not that much different from the standard search, except that using Advanced Reading Level blocked a result from the scumbag SEO spam domain directhit.com on the second page of plain results.