Monthly Archives: October 2020

Get an RSS feed for any YouTube channel

31 Saturday Oct 2020

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks

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YouTube has removed the ‘Export RSS feeds list’ option from your Subscribed Channels List. It used to be that it was at the foot of the page. The link to this feature is now nowhere to be found.

For the time being the RSS feeds are still there and working, however. A standard subscription URL is in the form of…

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCralF3lNmSNYFaFtul5apuw

.. and a handy bit of UserScript reveals the current YouTube RSS feed URL is in the form of…

http://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCralF3lNmSNYFaFtul5apuw

Therefore, you go to your Subscribed Channels List page, and there use LinkClump (or similar) to copy out just the channel URLs and then in Notepad…

Search: /channel/

Replace: /feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=

You then have a list of RSS feeds for your subscriptions.

Fixing Paperity

28 Wednesday Oct 2020

Posted by in New titles added to JURN

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Paperity appears to have been heavily depreciated in search results, by Google Search. Since circa 2015 Paperity has usefully listed and linked OA articles in hybrid journals. For five years indexing Paperity thus enabled JURN to offer coverage of the OA articles in about 50+ hybrid journals in the arts and humanities, mostly at the publisher Springer. JURN users also benefited from by-catch of hybrid journal OA articles in other subjects.

Per-article pages at Paperity now appear to be being automatically de-duplicated and discarded by Google Search, as expressed in JURN, in favour of the same article as known to sources such as Semantic Scholar and EuroPubMed (both also in JURN) and other aggregators. As a fallback I’m now indexing just the per-journal pages at Paperity (i.e. their linked lists of OA articles in a journal), and Google Search seems to treat these as an absolute backstop. Meaning that that they will show up in JURN’s results, but often only as the very last result in a short set of results. This is quite useful behaviour, as it doesn’t distract users up at the top of the results. Formerly, JURN indexed the per-article pages at Paperity, but these were no longer appearing in results. Hence the need for change.

I’m also now indexing a couple of the relevant Springer journals directly in JURN. Indexing of article pages at *.springeropen.com also serves as a further backstop. Please contact me if SpringerOpen indexing doesn’t work well for your Springer OA journal, and you would like it directly indexed in JURN.

Also, note that JURN excludes URL paths with /figures/ from SpringerOpen and Springer journal links. These are pages containing the graphics, graphs etc from the article. While useful in their own right, and as such grabbed by Google Search, they are best approached in academic search via their main article page.

Venezuelan Scielo – URL change

26 Monday Oct 2020

Posted by in New titles added to JURN, Spotted in the news

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It appears that the Venezuelan Scielo at www. scielo.org.ve/ is now just ve. scielo.org/ DuckDuckGo still indexes the old URL, which it seems no longer works. I get a pass-through to the Wayback Machine at Archive.org on hitting such dead URLs, though that’s the result of my browser plugin.

Google Search is indexing the new URL only, which works. When Google Search changes, it’s usually a sign that the old URL really is kaput.

It’s probably best to keep an eye on the other Scielo aggregators, to see if they make the same change and thus break older URL paths and Web links. They don’t appear to have made such a change, so far.

My guess would be that the .ve change could be a result of buying one of those ‘vanity’ fixes which remove the www. in an URL. After some hard-sell from a salesman such fixes usually turn out to be very expensive to maintain, and after a time the URL often defaults back to normal.

In the meantime JURN is also directly indexing Venezuela’s journals at produccioncientificaluz.org and saber.ucv.ve/ojs/ and erevistas.saber.ula.ve. The nation is starving, but their journals are still online and reachable for now. The latter two appear to have different sets of journals, despite being from the same University of the Andes.

Yahoo Groups to close

13 Tuesday Oct 2020

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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The Yahoo empire continues to crash and burn. The old Yahoo Groups will shut down completely on 15th December 2020. If you had a Group there with content that’s still useful, now’s the time to back it up and upload the .ZIP file to Archive.org in perpetuity. Although I imagine that Archive.org itself may already be ‘on the job’ in that respect.

Working Excel spreadsheet: Take a list of home-page URLs, harvest the HTML, extract a snippet of data from each

11 Sunday Oct 2020

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks

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I’m pleased to present a free ‘ISSN harvester’ for Excel 2007 or higher.

What you need: You have a long list of home-page URLs, one per line. You want a small snippet of data captured from each HTML page. The target data is not in any kind of repeating HTML table or tag, and could be anywhere on each page.

Usage: A long list of home-page URLs is pasted into the first column. The sheet then checks each URL in turn, and also extracts their HTML source into an adjacent cell. A formula in the end column then looks at the captured HTML and extracts the first instance of “ISSN” and any 70 following characters. Where no result is found, the formula leaves a general label as a placeholder.

Download: ISSN-and-data-checker-working.xlsm

Works in Windows and Excel 2007. May require the user to have Internet Explorer installed. Tested and working fine on an 800+ URL list. Each URL just captures the loaded page, not the entire website.

It should be adaptable to capture any snippet of data, just vary and replace the formula. Theoretically, you could also add extra columns to capture other data from the same HTML, such as “i s s n” or “eISSN”.

Credit: This is derived and expanded from the free “Bulk URL status checker in Excel sheet”, which checked a list of home-page URLs for 404s, and also rather usefully extracted each page of HTML to a cell while it was about it. I would have had no idea how to set up that ‘HTML per cell’ bit, without his working example. That spreadsheet was kindly shared on the TechTweaks blog by ‘Conscience’ in April 2017. Here it has been adapted by myself to also extract data.

Added to JURN

10 Saturday Oct 2020

Posted by in Ecology additions, New titles added to JURN

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Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies (the life and work of the famous author of Anne of Green Gables)

Technical Bulletins of the Williamstown + Atlanta Art Conservation Center

Archiv Orientalni, 1929-2010. Later known as ArOr: Quarterly Journal of African and Asian Studies. Partly indexed by JURN via the URL kramerius.lib.cas.cz/periodical/ — which is not ideal, in terms of either target or Google Search’s current indexing, but is the best that can be done at present.

WIPO Magazine (World Intellectual Property Organisation, JURN was already indexing the WIPO Journal).

Quantitative Science Studies (MIT, “theoretical and empirical research on science and the scientific workforce”)

Philosophy of Medicine

Luminaria (interdisciplinary natural biology, Brazil, latest issues are partly in English)

+

Three more UK repositories, and the per-article record pages of IA Scholar at fatcat.wiki/release/ (the latter fairly poorly indexed by Google Search, at present).

Initial harvest of ISSNs is now integrated into the openECO directory. The process of adding ISSNs is not yet complete.

Working Excel spreadsheet: Align two lists without fuzzy lookup

09 Friday Oct 2020

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Here’s my possibly-useful working Excel list-sorter, made for Excel 2007 and higher.

Situation: You have a long list of items in column A. You’ve copied out this list to run it through a process elsewhere, perhaps in some arcane Windows freeware that is the only thing that can do a particular job for free. This process has added a snippet of wanted new data at the end of each item. Hurrah!

But… possibly the process also discarded some lines, when no new data was found. Or perhaps a ‘helpful’ intern has later added a few lines here and there to the new list. Your new processed list is thus rather awkwardly jumbled up. You can no longer easily align your valuable new data snippets against the old list.

Use: Paste your jumbled and expanded list in Column E, and Column C will automatically sort and auto-align it alongside the original list. No ‘fuzzy lookup’ engine is required.

Download: match_and_sort_without_fuzzy_lookup

Two vital Google Search UserScripts, fixed

07 Wednesday Oct 2020

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

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Newly fixed vital UserScripts for use with Google Search:

Google Search Sidebar

Google Search restore URLs (undo breadcrumbs). This restores readable URL-paths in search results, a vital aid to avoiding the growing amount of spam in Google Search.

Add the following to the top of the Breadcrumbs script, to stop it working on Google Books.


// @exclude http*://www.google.*tbm=bks*
// @exclude http*://www.google.*.*tbm=bks*