01 Thursday May 2014
Posted in Spotted in the news
One of perils of being sucked into the ludicrous UK Research Assessment Framework (REF) worldview…
…seeing the prizewinning products of the best US universities ruled out of contention for UK jobs, for lack of sufficient “REF-able” outputs
01 Thursday May 2014
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
Did Microsoft effectively abandon Microsoft Academic Search to autopilot, sometime last year?
“an unexpected and unnoticed discovery: Microsoft Academic Search is outdated since 2013 … the second part of the working paper aims at advancing some data demonstrating this lack of update. … The data shows an abrupt drop in the number of documents indexed [per year?] from 2,346,228 in 2010 to 8,147 in 2013 and 802 in 2014.”
01 Thursday May 2014
Posted in New titles added to JURN
Removed International Journal of Maritime History, which was free from SAGE until the end of April 2014.
Checked on the free status of Journal for the History of Astronomy. This journal is currently stated by SAGE to have an unspecified free trial period for its first issue (Feb 2014). Highwire lists it as a wholly “free site”.
30 Wednesday Apr 2014
Posted in Spotted in the news
Quackwatch has a list of journals and magazines it has spotted publishing uncritical articles on things like the latest eating fads, dubious cures, ‘wonder’ health supplements, or fashionable medical pseudo-science. I’m not surprised to see the ubiquitous Huffington Post make the list.
30 Wednesday Apr 2014
Posted in JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news
Project Naptha, a free browser plugin to easily copy text from inside a Web picture. Only works with Google Chrome at present, but…
“Depending on the number of sign-ups, a Firefox version may be released in a few weeks”.
Reportedly works on Web-res pictures and at angles, although I’m guessing that the excellent MS Office OneNote: Insert | Screen Clipping | ‘Copy text’ function might work better on tiny text.
Handy for those occasional screen captured TOCs, journal page scans without OCR, Google Books pages, and also for unfunny cats. Don’t like a LOLcat caption? Just…
“Right-click and you can erase the words from an image, edit the words, or even translate it into a different language”
30 Wednesday Apr 2014
“In 2013, the SciELO Network of national journal collections covered 16 countries, 15 in Ibero-America [South and Central America] plus South Africa, which as a whole, index around 1,000 journal titles and publish more than 40,000 articles a year…”
“A priority action line of SciELO is internationalization that, among other strategies, includes the gradual adoption of the English language for the communication of research with the aim of expanding its international visibility. All article texts must have at least the title, abstract and keywords in English. … journals are increasingly adopting English as either their only language of communication of journal content or are using a multilingual format together with Spanish or Portuguese.”
30 Wednesday Apr 2014
Posted in Spotted in the news
This new historical survey may interest some: Open-Access Repositories Worldwide, 2005–2012: past growth, current characteristics, and future possibilities…
“This paper reviews the worldwide growth of open-access (OA) repositories, 2005 to 2012, using data collected by the OpenDOAR project. Initial repository development was focused on North America, Western Europe, and Australasia, particularly the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia, followed by Japan. Since 2010, there has been repository growth in East Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe, especially in Taiwan, Brazil, and Poland. During the period, some countries, including France, Italy, and Spain, have maintained steady growth, whereas other countries, notably China and Russia, have experienced limited growth. Globally, repositories are predominantly institutional, multidisciplinary and English-language based. They typically use open-source OAI-compliant software but have immature licensing arrangements. Although the size of repositories is difficult to assess accurately, available data indicate that a small number of large repositories and a large number of small repositories make up the repository landscape.”
I wondered if this also discussed “growth” in terms of “the growth in indexing”. But sadly the article is behind a Wiley paywall (Update: also self-archived). The poor state of repository indexing by Google, and the probable reasons for it, are however addressed in this 2012 paper from the University of Utah: Invisible Institutional Repositories: addressing the low indexing ratios of IRs in Google Scholar.
30 Wednesday Apr 2014
Posted in New titles added to JURN
Removed Liverpool University Press journals from JURN, following the ending of their generous offer of free access to academic journals during April 2014.
27 Sunday Apr 2014
Posted in My general observations, New titles added to JURN
I’m considering adding the vast archive of the BBC Radio’s uniformly excellent In Our Time round-table discussions to JURN. However, I’m unsure if these can be accessed by listeners outside of the UK? Can readers of this blog post a comment, please, if they can listen to and download these programmes from outside the UK?
Sadly the BBC uses an undifferented/gibberish URL structure for its per-programme records. Its record page for its latest show on Tristram Shandy, for instance, is at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0418phf But the index of In Our Time could be indexed in a basic way in JURN, via the URL for the A-Z listing pages: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/in-our-time/archive/*/all (where * is a wildcard)
27 Sunday Apr 2014
Posted in JURN metrics
Another group test:
| JURN group test: “Tristram Shandy” reception April 2014. Searching for free full-text scholarly articles, theses or book chapters variously related to the reception of the famous and seminal book Tristram Shandy. Clicked through on possible results, and briefly evaluated. |
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| DOAJ | 0 | Used ‘Article’ search. 0 from zero results. | |||||||||
| JournalTOCS | 0 | 0 from zero results. | |||||||||
| Ingenta Connect | 0 | 0 from zero results. | |||||||||
| Journal Seek | 0 | 0 from zero results. | |||||||||
| Mendeley | 0 | Searched ‘Articles’ only, then filtered for Open Access articles only — which produced no relevant results. Then removed the OA filter, which gave one possible result of around 15 — but that proved to be ‘404 not found’. | |||||||||
| OATD | 0 | 0 from zero results. | |||||||||
| OAlib | 0 | OAlib appeared to be nearly totally bamboozled by the inclusion of ‘reception’, only four results of the first 50 being about Tristram Shandy. | |||||||||
| BASE | 1 | Searched ‘Verbatim’ on ‘Entire Document’. Examined first 50 results. | |||||||||
| NDLtd | 1 | 1 of only two results. | |||||||||
| Microsoft Academic | 1 | 1 of only one result. | |||||||||
| CORE | 2 | CORE appeared to be totally bamboozled by the inclusion of ‘reception’, so I tried again with just “Tristram Shandy” + set the filter to just English results. | |||||||||
| OPENDoar | 3 | Examined first 50 results. | |||||||||
| Digital Commons Network | 3 | From 10 results. Only one hit was strongly relevant. | |||||||||
| Google Search | 4 | Using unmodified Internet Explorer 11, not signed in to Google. Forced verbatim. Examined first 50 results. Didn’t count Google Books links. | |||||||||
| Google Scholar | 4 | Examined first 50 results. Google Books links not counted. Faux PDF links for hs3esdk.ru and kmvhr3.biz (dubious-looking Project Muse duplicates in Russia, presumably eager to accept your credit card details!) not counted. | |||||||||
| JURN | 14 | Checked first 50 results, not counting articles or chapters that mention the book title in passing. | |||||||||
Overall, all the search engines tested here struggled with this search, though might have done better with additional keywords.
Google Books also struggled somewhat with this test, picking up only three titles with free preview pages. However, it may interest readers to see the full list of titles found by Google Books:
The Reception of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey.
The Critical Reception and Parodies of Tristram Shandy.
Shandymania (actually a thesis).
A Culture of Mimicry: Laurence Sterne, His Readers and the Art of Bodysnatching.
Laurence Sterne in Modernism and Postmodernism.
The Reception of Laurence Sterne in Europe.
Labyrinth of Digressions: Tristram Shandy as Perceived and Influenced by Sterne’s Early Imitators.
Compare this with the following additional book titles which were discovered by Amazon UK:
Adaptations of Laurence Sterne’s Fiction.
Laurence Sterne in France (Continuum Reception Studies).
Sterne: The Critical Heritage.
Yorick and the Critics: Sterne’s Reputation in England, 1760-1868.
Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel.
The Plagiarism Allegation in English Literature from Butler to Sterne.
WorldCat was able to pick up two additional book titles to add to the above lists, of six titles found in total:
* Turning into Sterne: Viktor Shklovskii and literary reception.
* The Created Self : the reader’s role in eighteenth-century fiction.
The critical reception and parodies of Tristram Shandy.
The reception of Tristram Shandy and A sentimental journey in France, 1760-1800.
Laurence Sterne in France (Continuum Reception Studies).
Reception of Laurence Sterne in Europe.
So Google Books, Amazon UK, and WorldCat proved a useful trio for quick initial location of likely book titles. With the added advantage that some of the titles found by Google Books and Amazon offer free previews of pages or even whole chapters.
Not all is as it seems, however. The seemingly spot-on The Critical Reception and Parodies of Tristram Shandy (1950) appears to be a ‘ghost’ book, being a database record generated by a long-lost 1950 Masters disseration at Columbia University NYC written by Gloria P. Freeman. So no chance of getting that one cheap on Amazon for $2.
In its first 50 results Summon (limited to: Books | in English | Criticism or History) only managed to pick up three suitable titles: Labyrinth of digressions: Tristram Shandy as perceived and influenced by Sterne’s Early imitators; and Turning into Sterne: Viktor Shklovskii and literary reception; and Laurence Sterne in France (Continuum Reception Studies).
The British Library catalogue could only turn up two books in two results, The reception of Tristram Shandy and A sentimental journey in France, 1760-1800 (in its thesis form), and Turning into Sterne : Viktor Shklovskii and literary reception.