Monthly Archives: October 2015

New FAQ section

11 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by in My general observations

≈ Leave a comment

I’ve added a new section on the JURN FAQ page: “I’m a linguist or country specialist. JURN wants to return mostly English results when I search using words in another language. How do I fix this?”…

JURN does ‘auto-translate + add synonyms’ when a user searches using non-English keywords, while also auto-detecting your home nation. For instance, if you search from the UK for the single word…

مقارنة (Arabic, meaning: comparison, comparative)

… then the UK user sees search results containing مقارنة OR comparison OR comparative, with English language results predominating. Search instead for “مقارنة” (in inverted commas) and the majority of the search results are in Arabic.

This automatic nation-detection feature makes results more useful, for most people. But it may present a problem for linguists or country specialists who regularly search JURN, or for those who are part of a diaspora living outside their home nation. One solution might be to spoof your IP address via a free Web browser add-on, such as the easy-to-use Hola. Hola allows you to bypass the petty national restrictions that can be placed on access to Web content, by making you appear to be in another nation.

New JISC report on scholarly discovery

06 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by in Official and think-tank reports, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

JISC has commissioned a new September 2015 Spotlight Literature Review on scholarly discovery, which is available now in PDF. Short, but to-the-point…

in most cases staff over-estimate the extent to which users use different library services, in some cases very greatly. […] overall they think, it seems mistakenly, that the library discovery layer attracts very similar usage to Google Scholar”

one recent ethnographic study of student research behaviour (Dalal et al, 2015) highlights the low levels of information literacy skills displayed by many undergraduates even after library training in research skills [… they still had] very basic search techniques and poor search strategies [and a] Failure to locate the full text of articles.”

I’m interested in serendipity’s role in online search, and so I was pleased that the report pointed me to the December 2014 Library Journal article “Serendipitous Discovery: Is it Getting Harder?”. I was also rather tickled to discover that the word ‘serendipity’ was invented by Horace Walpole.

Times Higher on Russian plagiarism

06 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by in Spotted in the news

≈ 1 Comment

Times Higher on allegedly rampant thesis plagiarism / ghost-writing in Russia…

PhD forgery is now an “integral part of Russia’s statehood”, rather than a “fringe phenomenon”, according to the analysis published in Higher Education in Russia and Beyond, a quarterly newsletter published by the country’s National Research University Higher School of Economics.”

Mass-production of PhDs is generally centred in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where “conveyor [belt] units” were found for “PhDifying” politicians, public officials and teachers”