Monthly Archives: November 2017

How to get your new RSS feed from Google News

03 Friday Nov 2017

Posted by in JURN's Google watch

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Annoyingly, Google appears to have just removed all its keyword-based RSS feeds for Google News. One gets the message…

This RSS feed URL is deprecated, please update. New URLs can be found in the footers at https://news.google.com/news.

But all it’s possible to get there is the generic national Spotlight headlines, as linked in the footer of the main Google News page…

https://news.google.com/news/rss/headlines?gl=GB&ned=uk&hl=en-GB

And even that feed “has no articles” when loaded into a feedreader.

What you actually need to do is to first run a new Google News search, then the new RSS feed link will appear in the footer of the page of search results.

If, at the same time as you’re fiddling with this annoying change-over, you want to swop out your Google News RSS for a working Bing News RSS feed, here’s how:

1. Do a keyword or phrase-based News search as usual, at Bing News.
2. Add -keyword to knock out unwanted stories (e.g. -police -NHS)
3. Then re-sort the search results by date.
4. Add &format=rss to the end of the URL. This turns it into a RSS feed from Bing News.
5. Now plug your new RSS feed into your newsreader.

Another Sci-Hub study

02 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by in Academic search, Spotted in the news

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Another recent study of the pirate academic site Sci-Hub, “Sci-Hub and LibGen: what if… why not?”. On a thoroughly randomised sample of articles, found via 55 different commercial databases recommended to students at McGill University, Canada…

the overall retrieval rates for the 2,750 samples, as of July 2017, is pretty good. The full-text retrieval rates for both Sci-Hub and LibGen are respectively 70% and 69% […] At the discipline level, the results are showing the lowest retrieval rates in Sci-Hub for Law (20%), Music (28%) and Business/Management (32%). [while] five databases (9%) are showing a 100% retrieval rate (British Humanities [Humanities Index, nowadays tracking around 400 titles from the UK and Commonwealth], Elsevier ScienceDirect, Sage, Springer and Wiley) coming from the following disciplines – Humanities and Multidisciplinary.

“100% retrieval rate” for the Humanities Index seems odd. Although looking at the titles list of current actively indexed titles, it seems possible for the 318 “Core coverage titles”. Though I’m not sure you’d be picking up many articles at Sci-Hub from newspapers such as the Times Literary Supplement or trade journals such as Town and Country Planning.

The Country House Library

02 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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Of possible interest for those seeking a Christmas present for a librarian-scholar, the just published The Country House Library from Yale University Press. Sumptuously illustrated and weighing in at 350 pages, this scholarly book surveys the entire history of the country house library in the British Isles from the Roman era to today. The author is deputy director of Cambridge University Library, and was the former libraries curator to the National Trust. His findings push the history of such libraries much further back that the current consensus of ‘the late 17th century’, according to a Country Life magazine review.

By the way, ignore the Amazon UK and USA reviews. The dates (2000 and 2015) indicate the reviews refer to another book entirely. They are obviously an artefact of Amazon’s very annoying auto-pinning of old reviews to new books with the same or similar title. The same happens on pages for fine critical print editions of public domain books (e.g. Wells’s The Time Machine), which are adorned with miffed reviews of shovelware OCR ebooks and basic reprints. Authors and publishers really should be complaining vigorously to Amazon about this highly misleading practice.

How to fix Firefox, when viewing about:addons totally freezes the browser

01 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks

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A seemingly common Firefox problem:

1. You want to check your list of Extensions (i.e: your browser’s installed add-ons). To do this you go to: top menu | Tools | Add-ons | about:addons
2. The top “Get Add-ons tab” of about:addons is active, and it wants to load. But can’t.
3. The “Loading…” button appears in the middle of this “Get Add-ons” page, but never completes “Loading…”. Firefox totally freezes.
4. You have to Alt+Ctrl+Del to force Firefox to close down.

This appears to be a local Internet service provider problem, because turning on a VPN (in the USA, in my case) before going to the “Get Add-ons” tab solves the problem. The page loads as it should.

I assume the problem arises because the ISP’s local cache of the relevant addons page hangs, and Firefox is unable to fallback gracefully from that failure.

One solution:

1. Load Firefox.
2. Turn on your VPN.
3. The about:addons / “Get Add-ons” tab should now load properly.
4. Switch down to the next tab, “Extensions”. (Which is what you wanted to view in the first place).
5. Turn off VPN and close the about:addons page. Close and restart Firefox.
6. Firefox should remember the last tab it was on for about:addons, this now being the “Extensions” tab. This tab, being seemingly local to your PC, should have no problem loading.

The “Get Add-ons” service being (temporarily) useless, you should instead use the Add-ons for Firefox Web page to find and install new add-ons.

Open Access Journals in Commercial Databases

01 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Academic search, Open Access publishing, Spotted in the news

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“Open for Business: Open Access Journals in Commercial Databases”, a new article (dated 27th October 2017) in The Serials Librarian journal.

‘Table 3. Presence of OAs titles in databases’. Percent of DOAJ titles found in database:

Scopus – 29.18%
Academic Search Complete – 18.00%
Web of Science – 10.91%

… between 70.82% and 89.09% of DOAJ journals are not found in the databases analyzed here, which is potentially problematic given that most researchers depend on databases to locate scholarly information