Monthly Archives: January 2011

Six new titles added

05 Wednesday Jan 2011

Posted by in New titles added to JURN

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Six new ejournals added to the JURN index:—

Mutatis Mutandis (Latin American translation journal. Has some English articles)

Ikala : revista de lenguaje y cultura (Has regular English articles)

Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies (First issue due April 2011)

Independent Review : a journal of political economy, The (Edited by a historian, it has many articles and book reviews on historical topics relating to the economy and policy. Also indexing the Working Papers)

Social and Cultural Sciences Journal (Kaname Osamu School, Chiba University, Japan. Has some English articles)

Historical Social Research Transition (HSR-Transition. Full-text available for recent issues)

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Papers of the Comparative Research Workshop, Yale University.

The Interdisciplinary Environmental History : Natural Environment and Societal Behaviour in Central Europe monograph series, published by Goettingen University.

Greatly improved coverage of Spanish-language ejournals in the small states of Central America.

Competition for the Google CSE

04 Tuesday Jan 2011

Posted by in How to improve academic search, JURN's Google watch, Spotted in the news

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IndexTank, custom search in a box. Nice idea. But it seems to be aimed at individual business looking to reduce their IT overheads, and is useless as a replacement for a Web-wide Google CSE…

“IndexTank doesn’t actively fetch data from you as a web crawler would do. Instead, your application sends IndexTank the data as soon as it is created or updated”

“not a standalone web search engine, and we don’t currently have a way for you to set it up directly through the Web. It requires downloading software such as a WordPress plugin (if you wanted to add better search to your blog, for example) or writing a program to interact with our servers.”

Worse, it can’t even auto-extract indexable text from the PDFs you send it…

“IndexTank, like other full-text search alternatives, indexes only text. However, for common formats like PDF or Word, it is very easy to parse them to obtain the readable text by using open source tools.”

I should mention some of the other ‘sort-of’ search-in-a-box options.

* The old and vulnerable (in the light of the Delicious closure) Yahoo BOSS

* Spinn3r. But it can only supply “A-list” blog content (so possibly not much use for hyperlocal indexing of a city-region), and you have to build your own widget to hook into its API.

* 80 Legs is a pricey monthly-subscription web-crawler. I’m uncertain if their stated ‘URL limit’ refers to the number of URLs on the originating site-list, or the number of files actually found by their crawler. If it’s the latter, you could run out of space very fast.

* And of course the new Blekko, which lets you upload a text file full of your selected URLs, and then uses them to create a ‘slashtag’ that delimits people’s searches. The last one is interesting, and I might eventually have a play around with it. Although possibly that’ll be when you’re no longer limited to 1,000 URLs, and are allowed to use wildcards in the URL list.

It’s great to see some competition emerging to Google CSEs, and perhaps it will eventually spur Google into offering a commercial ‘Deep’ Web-wide version of the Custom Search Engine:— full-text deep indexing of all the documents found at any website it’s pointed at; all the documents found are drawn on to produce your custom search results, every time; and the user gets 12,000 URLs to play with. Or perhaps Microsoft Bing will offer such a service. It might be limited to non-profits, so as to keep the SEO spivs out.

If RSS dies, we lose the ability to read in private

03 Monday Jan 2011

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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Something rather dangerous in its potential long-term consequences, coming in Firefox 4.0…

“In Firefox 4.0, there will be no RSS button on the toolbar [address bar] by default (it has been moved to the bookmarks menu). … If RSS dies, we lose the ability to read in private.”

The author may overstate his case, but I’m also deeply uneasy about the way it’s simply being assumed that the childish follow-my-leader activity on Twitter/Facebook can somehow take the place of actually educating people in information discovery.

How is the JURN ‘headline’ total calculated?

03 Monday Jan 2011

Posted by in JURN metrics, My general observations

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How is JURN’s total number of ejournals calculated? Well, it’s a number that’s been built up incrementally since the beta. But a rough checking calculation at Jan 2011 would go something like this:—

* 2,580 non-duplicate English-language titles, as listed in the 2,700-link JURN Directory.
* Around 620 marginal ‘partly in English’ titles that I didn’t enter in the English-language JURN Directory, and yet which are not on Revues / Persee / Dialnet / Cairn since they’re not in Spanish/French.
* 2,792 Spanish titles in the arts and humanities and ‘philologies’, as currently indexed via Dialnet. 1,367 titles on Dialnet currently have full-text, and perhaps 600 of these offer articles relevant to the arts and humanities. *
* 105 older French titles on Persee.
* 274 titles on Revues, perhaps 260 if a handful of geography titles and ‘collections’ are discounted.
* Around 250 relevant titles via the Hungarian central index.
* Around 180 relevant French titles via Cairn.
* Around 250 humanities titles from the Central America region via Redalyc.
* Around 170 arts and humanities titles in Portuguese, via Livre.
* Perhaps another 200 (perhaps more) non-English titles from various national amalgamation services such as those in Serbia, Taiwan, Singapore, Mexico, Catalonia, etc.

That would give a grand total of about 5,200 titles indexed.

However, if only those titles that carry at least some English articles are to be counted, then the calculation is more like: 2,580 English titles + 620 known partly-English + another 700 unknown partly-English titles hidden among the total at Dialnet / Redalyc, et al = 3,900.

* Indexing Dialnet does bring in some article record pages that don’t contain links to full-text. JURN indexes Dialnet via three URLs that bring in: i) just the main index pages for journals (not the TOC pages), ii) full-text PDF articles hosted on Dialnet, and iii) article record pages. The latter may or may not contain links to full-text (I estimate about a one-in-six chance of full-text from a Dialnet record, in arts and humanities searches). However, for those searching for English search-terms, this is unlikely to flood the search results with masses of records that only contain citations / abstracts. I think it’s a price worth paying, when weighed against the wealth of full-text material that it can bring in for a searcher.

Open Access Newsletter, Jan 2011

02 Sunday Jan 2011

Posted by in My general observations, Open Access publishing, Spotted in the news

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A new January 2011 issue of the Open Access Newsletter, providing a useful round-up of what has been a boom year for open access. The DOAJ added 1,401 new ‘pure’ OA titles in 2010, and as a regular tracker of these I’d guesstimate that perhaps 8 to 10 percent of these were arts and humanities titles (about 120 to 140 titles?). Not all of these were newly launched, since the DOAJ also sometimes retrospectively indexes established titles from previous years. In the arts and humanities the DOAJ currently lists 944 titles. So combining these figures might very roughly suggest a 14% increase in DOAJ arts and humanities titles during 2010?