Monthly Archives: December 2013

Excel: Are those blank cells really empty? How to scrub them quickly, then fill them with text

28 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks

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Another handy hard-won tip for MS Excel 2007, which may save time for someone new to the software. This shows how to blank cells in Excel that are not really blank (because a formula left some hidden junk in them).

Scenario: You tried copying the data and pasting it back in again, as “Values”. It had no effect. You removed trailing and stray spaces. With no effect. You still couldn’t get Excel to select all the blank cells. Here’s what worked for me, without running more formulas or macros:

1. Download the free ASAP Utilities add-on for Excel. Install, and locate its top button bar.

2. Select all cells in your target column.

3. In ASAP Utilities choose: Numbers & Dates | “Convert unrecognised numbers (text?) to numbers”. This has the very useful side-effect of clearing all the hidden junk that may be clogging up your apparently blank cells.

4. Now in Excel you can go: Home | Find & Select | Go To Special… | Blanks | OK. All your blank cells will be selected and highlighted, whereas before this operation would not find all the blank cells.

To place a text marker into all your selected blank cells: press F2, then type a word or phrase into the first selected cell. Then, instead of pressing Enter as normal, hold down Crtl on the keyboard + press Enter. All your blank cells will then be filled with the typed text.

ASAP Utilities also has a simpler “fill blank cells” option, but it seems to be unable to handle more than 400 rows at a time.

Excel example sheet: compare lists and extract non-duplicates

28 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks

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I’ve been playing around with MS Excel 2007, and found that I wanted to paste in two lists and then have Excel automatically identify and extract all the non-duplicates. The second list is a jumbled up variant of the first, with some new additions in it.

Here’s a working .xls file showing my example: excel-sort-two-lists-find-non-duplicates (20kb). The embedded formula spots and extracts the new additions, handily placing them directly alongside their occurrence.

excel-example

Tip: The formula currently only goes 18 cells down in Column C. To extend it further, click that 18th cell, spot the little “+” in the corner of the cell, and then drag the “+” down for as many extra cells as you need.

There are a zillion bits of advice on using Excel to identify duplicates, but not so many for spotting and extracting non-duplicates in this manner. So hopefully this working example will be of use to someone.

10 steps to move from Chrome to Firefox

23 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks, JURN's Google watch

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Google has announced that Google Chrome browser users will not be allowed to install their own choice of plugins, addons, and userscripts, from January 2014. Today I moved over to using Firefox, as a result. Here are my notes on the “how to” of the move from Chrome to Firefox, in the hope the notes may help a few others:

1. Backup any old bookmarks from any existing install of Firefox. It seemed best to start fresh, so I removed the old version of Firefox via a full uninstall.

2. Download and install the very latest Firefox. As this was a fresh install, the first time Firefox loads it should offer to automatically port over all your bookmarks, toolbar bookmarks, passwords, etc. from Chrome. (The tiny favicons will only reappear, next to bookmarks on your toolbar, when you revisit those bookmarked pages).

3. Tweak the Firefox interface. I prefer to get back to a retro look with Classic Reload-Stop-Go Buttons.

Then go View | Toolbars | Customize. While this Customize library window is open, you are able to drag around the navigation icons in the navigation bar. Get the icons positioned how you want them, then before you close the Customize library window choose “Icons + Text”. Then click “done”. This is how I like the top left on my browser…

navmenu

4. Get the RSS newsfeed icon back in the address / location bar by installing this addon. The RSS button it adds had success in passing over the feed to my free desktop RSS news reader Feeddemon.

5. Add some basic advert and click-jacking blocker add-ons:

Adblock Plus

Flashblock

NoScript (annoying initially)

And then in Firefox go to: Tools | Addons | Plugins and disable all the craptastic media-player plugins that ship with Firefox (RealPlayer and the like, ugh). I only left Flash on “Always Activate” — since the Flashblock add-on (above) keeps it under control.

6. Then block the web’s other annoyances with these add-ons:

Facebook Purity (and import any blocklist / settings from your Chrome version of F.B. Purity)

Comment Snob

7. Add userscript capability to Firefox:

Greasemonkey (required for running all userscripts). Followed by…

GoogleMonkeyR. Vital for working with Google Search, in my opinion. I set it up to display results in three columns, and also to block several bits of Google Search cruft.

googlemonkeyr

monkeyr

(To find GoogleMonkeyR settings: make any search in Google, then right-click on the grey cog. Bear in mind that ticking “Don’t display the Google Web Search dialogues” may prevent the search box appearing above the top of search results in Google Images, and Google Books).

Direct Links in Google Search. This forces direct URLs to be used in the search result links.

Google Hit Hider by Domain (blocks Google Search results by unwanted domain). Import your old Google Search blocklist from “Personal Blocklist (by Google)”, then use the de-duplicate tool in Google Hit Hider…

export

import

8. Finally, go to Tools | Options | General | Home Page. There paste in this handy home page URL, which will send you to the main Google Search when you click on the Home button in Firefox:

https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&complete=0&tbo=1&num=18&tbs=li:1

This special URL has certain parameters embedded in it, which:

* forces Google Search to use Verbatim (it searches on just what you type, not what it guesses you might want)
* sets the number of results to 18 (perfect with a widescreen monitor and GoogleMonkeyR using three columns)
* forces the top Search Tools open, displaying drop-down items
* forces Google Search to use its complete main USA index, without making an automatic switch to a local version
* and turns Google Search’s Autocomplete off.

It also seems to have the advantage of turning off nagging on the Google Search front page, re: “we use cookies!” and “download Chrome now!”.

The resulting ad-free nag-free search results layout, with GoogleMonkeyR and the above fixes:

searchfinal

9. You can use the same URL trick with a Google News search, dragged onto your bookmarks bar, thus:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=uk&tbm=nws&authuser=0&q=keyword&num=18&tbs=sbd:1

Replace the keyword in the above URL with your own. Switch out “uk” for “us”, etc.

Also handy is this Google Books link, with parameters included:

https://www.google.com/search?lr=lang_en&tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=%22beautiful+roses%22&tbs=,bkv:p,bkt:b&num=12

10. Other Firefox add-ons that are also very useful:

* the free grammar and spelling checker After the Deadline + Menu Editor to reverse AfterTD’s impudent hijacking of the top of the right-click context menu in Firefox. Sadly there’s no way to have AfterTD use British English spelling.

* Google Translator for Firefox.

* Paste Email Address

* Make Link

* FEBE Backup

* Bookmark Favicon Changer 2.0 (is the only one that works with the latest Firefox)

* Instasaver (Instapaper saver button for Firefox) (works with the latest Firefox including Nightly developer version, requires an Instapaper account)

* NoSquint (a nice flexible and easily resettable zoom tool)

Group test: free search for free full-text journal articles and chapters

22 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by in My general observations

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Time for another group test of search tools offering various forms of free full-text access. The search term I used for the test was: “frontier thesis”, an influential idea which has been well chewed over and widely used, since being presented in Turner’s famous “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893). The chosen test may favour JURN slightly, since JURN is perhaps overly strong in the field of history. On the other hand, and as a counterweight, this test also favours general academic search-engines able to cover fields such as geography, politics, and economics.

Results from looking for relevant full-text articles or book chapters, not theses or dissertations, in:

Zero | Google Scholar (examined the first four pages of results, and was not counting links to JSTOR, or Muse or pages via Google Books).

Zero | DOAJ (searched at the article level)

Zero | JournalTOCS (searched ‘articles by keywords’)

Zero | IngentaConnect (had only two results)

Zero | JournalSeek

Zero | AOlib

Zero | Rock Your Paper

1 | Mendeley (searched papers) (zero results, but then tried on: frontier thesis turner and examined first 10 results)

1 | Scirus

1 | Microsoft Academic Search (examined the first two pages of results)

1 | Journal Database (had only four results. Site seems to be basically a reformatted rip of the old static DOAJ, with most of the humanities missing?)

5 | OpenDOAR (examined the first 20 results)

10 | BASE (searched verbatim, no “”) (BASE is now able to filter results by journal articles — examined the first 20 of these filtered results)

20 | JURN (examined the first 20 results)

Notes:

* Although not included in the above list, a search of Google News once again gave a small number of interesting and relevant results from serious-minded sources: A Daily Telegraph review of the popular biographical survey book The Men Who United the States; a long free excerpt from the new book “The Petropolis of Tomorrow” (on cities which form around resource extraction) from Archinect journal; and a New York Times obituary, “Andro Linklater, Who Re-Examined American Frontierism, Dies at 68”.

* It’s excellent to see that the repository search engine BASE is now able to filter results by ‘type: journal articles’, and is even able to further filter by ‘known open access’ (although the latter currently works very poorly). So far as I know BASE is the first repository search tool to add this useful feature.

* It’s interesting to note that, unlike other academic search tools, JURN‘s search results don’t collapse into irrelevance by the second or third page of results (so long as the initial search was well formed).

* Why no Open J-Gate or FindArticles.com in the above list? They died a couple of years ago. It’s also been announced that Scirus is being abandoned in January 2014.

DOAJ makeover

19 Thursday Dec 2013

Posted by in Spotted in the news

≈ 1 Comment

The DOAJ has just launched a radical web design makeover. The DOAJ seems to have morphed into a single-box search engine, with all their records made dynamic. The lack of the old Directory might be a problem for student searchers unsure of the correct keywords and spellings, or even of the existence of a journal. There is a sidebar, which sort of serves as a filterable directory — but the usability is rather poor and it is only really usable in conjunction with a keyword search. I suspect the new dynamic results approach also presents problems for Google, since it effectively (unless they do something clever with OAI-PMH harvesting) blocks the Google Search bots from indexing any of the DOAJ’s records as static Web pages?

Web of Science gets sticky with Google’s Library Links

16 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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It appears that Web of Science will be offered…

“in conjunction with Google’s Library Links, article-level links to subscription full text [in Google Scholar search results] for patrons affiliated with a participating library”

Which means that…

“Thomson Reuters is pulling its Web of Science content from discovery services such as Summon, EBSCO Discovery Service, and Primo as early as the end of this year [2013].”

Perhaps this is partly a logical market recognition of the superiority of Google and Google Scholar over web-scale discovery services? That’s what I hear in reviews and tests. [Primo vs. Scholar | Primo, Summon, EDS, WorldCat Local vs. Google, Google Scholar]. One of the biggest differences seems to be that web-scale discovery assumes the data it uses is correct, whereas Google’s bots actively check/harvest/discard on a constant basis. I guess the downside of that is that over-zealous bots can occasionally suck dodgy links into the index.

A downside of the Web of Science integration into Scholar may be that university users will more than ever assume that Google Scholar + Google Library Links is all they need, not realising how much it leaves out. For instance, a 2011 study of Scholar by art historians found that Scholar was indexing only half of the DOAJ’s 30 art history titles. Adding WoS to Google Scholar doesn’t seem likely to cure that problem.

More academic corruption from China

08 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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More news about how academic journal corruption works in China…

“… a report in the U.S. journal Science [told of how] “China’s publication bazaar,” as it is described, allows unscrupulous scientists to pay big money — up to $26,300 — to become authors of scientific papers they didn’t write. […] They don’t do any experiments or research either [but are catered to by China’s] “flourishing academic black market involving shady agencies, corrupt scientists and compromised editors — many of them operating in plain view,” according to Science.”

Some of these dodgy papers are not simply published behind the Great Firewall of China. For instance, one was found in a legitimate western journal called the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences.

“Publishing in journals — especially those with international credibility — is often key to academic promotion and is seen as critical in China. “People are sparing no expense in order to get published in international journals,” Fan Dongsheng, a neurologist and former vice-president of Peking University Third Hospital, told Science.

On the falsification of educational outcome statistics

08 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by in My general observations, Spotted in the news

≈ 2 Comments

The latest EconTalk podcast is a fascinating long interview with Lant Pritchett (Professor of the Practice of International Development, Harvard). The first third of the programme discusses the widespread and systemic falsification of educational outcome statistics for government-run education in the developing world, as detailed in Pritchett’s new book The Rebirth of Education. I might also add that in some parts of the declining world, such as Russia, the educational and other statistics are also suspected to be diverging from reality. Nor is even the UK immune, as we now have rampant grade-inflation of degree classifications at the undergraduate level.