16 Saturday Mar 2024
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
As AI opens up the possibilities of mass cuneiform tablet transcription and translation, the question arises… where are the tablets? The website Where is the Cuneiform? aims to get researchers over that initial hurdle. U.S only, at present.
08 Friday Mar 2024
I’m pleased to learn about London’s annual Researcher to Reader Conference, which focusses on getting research to interested readers. Information Today has a detailed report of the February 2024 event…
even today, in 2024, we don’t have consistent metadata to identify the article type in many cases with certainty (is it a research article? A review article? An editorial?) nor even the corresponding author of an article, let alone knowing how much a university is paying publishers for APCs to publish articles. Would any other industry tolerate such vagueness?
02 Friday Jun 2023
Posted in Academic search
A new study of linkrot in Digital Humanities Quarterly, “Reference Rot in the Digital Humanities Literature”.
“[in the DHQ sample] over a quarter of sampled citations are links to websites. Over 30% of these references are [now] inaccessible or have additional access barriers.”
Perhaps we need a copyright-busting AI for this? Imagine that, with ‘one press of a button’, a ref-bot AI goes and visits/reads the reference links at the time of the article’s publication, and thus produces a unified set of summaries. Perhaps with each summary weighted towards topics being discussed in the paragraph before the point-of-citation. The result would then be offered alongside the published article, as an appendix. Since AI-made text cannot be in copyright, the publishers’s lawyers would presumably not swoon at such an idea. Of course, the author would then have to fact-check and human-approve it as correct. But that should not be to onerous.
16 Tuesday May 2023
Posted in Academic search
A quick test to see which search-engines still respect the – minus sign, commonly used to exclude search results containing an unwanted word. And are thus useful for proper research search.
Test query: Tolkien 2023 -calendar
Tested: Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google Search, Google Scholar, Carrot2, eTools, Amazon.uk, YouTube, Yandex, Listen Notes (podcast search), Amazon, Internet Archive (“text contents”), Yahoo Search.
Results: The following still respect the minus sign:
* Google Search.
* Carrot2.
* eTools.
* Google Scholar (though there’s strange behaviour with this search – only two rather random results and a link to “see all”).
* YouTube, but only if you do it as…
Tolkien 2023 NOT -calendar
All the others failed. Yandex is unusable these days due to constant complex captchas, so couldn’t be tested. Amazon.uk doesn’t respect the – sign either, and lack of filters make it impossible (for instance) to remove all large-size headphones that use the infernal bluetooth for wireless connection.
21 Tuesday Sep 2021
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
React, an interesting new academic development in visual search. It works on the reverse-search principle: pick a picture, and see similar pictures in the results.
The prototype limits results to a couple of the UK’s larger national digitized art collections (National Archives, the V&A) and leavens these with the Edinburgh Botanic Garden for some flowers and curious pods and suchlike. An AI assists the “does it look like this…?” sorting.
29 Friday Jan 2021
A useful new analysis today from COAR, “Don’t believe the hype: repositories are critical for ensuring equity, inclusion and sustainability in the transition to open access”. Recent…
publishers’ comments portray gold open access as the only ‘legitimate’ route for open access, and attempt to diminish the repository (or green) route.
According to the author, some publishers are even implying that repositories have no aggregators, or are not present in Google Search or in specialist search-engines such as Scholar and GRAFT. Laughably, they apparently suggest that poor over-worked researchers will instead…
need to search through individual repositories to find the articles.
The publishers are also said to be trying to stop all but a sub-set of elite repositories from being used for data deposit, via…
proposing to define the repository selection criteria for where their authors’ should deposit research data. These criteria, which are very narrowly conceived, threaten to exclude thousands of national and institutional repositories as options for deposit.
Again, this sounds like it is designed to make researchers feel it’s more convenient to publish their article + data via a big publisher.
04 Sunday Oct 2020
Posted in Academic search, Ooops!, Spotted in the news
“Subject indexing in humanities: a comparison between a local university repository and an international bibliographic service”, Journal of Documentation, May 2020.
… the use of subject index terms in humanities journal articles [is] not supported in either the world’s largest commercial abstract and citation database Scopus or the local repository of a public university in Sweden. The indexing policies in the two services do not seem to address the needs of humanities scholars for highly granular subject index terms with appropriate facets; no controlled vocabularies for any humanities discipline are used whatsoever.
28 Monday Sep 2020
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
Internet Archive Scholar, formerly the Fat Cat project, now live and purring. Full-marks for having that rarest of sidebar search-filters, “OA”, though “Fulltext” is presumably broader and thus the one most likely to be used most. It’s also great to see there’s now a keyword-based way to search across all those microfilm journal runs that Archive.org has been uploading recently.
I wouldn’t have used the open ISSN ROAD as a source, nor visually implied that it’s a possible quality-marker. But at least it’s being balanced against the more rigorous DOAJ, and there’s a yes/no flag for both services on the article’s record-page…
It’s good that the “Read full-text” button goes to a PDF copy at the WayBack Machine, and yet there is also a live link on the record-page that serves to keep a record of the source URL.
Not all record pages have full-text, though these are very rare. In which case the user is prompted to find and save…
Unfortunately IA Scholar doesn’t appear to respect “quote marks” in search, which is not ideal for a scholarly search engine. For instance a search for “Creationism” defaults to results for “creation”. Nor can it do Google-y stuff like intitle: or anything similar via the sidebar, though I guess such refinements may be yet to come. Update: the command is: title:
A quick test search for Mongolian folk song suggests it’s not wildly astray in terms of relevance. It’s not being led astray by ‘Song’ as a common Chinese author name, for instance, or mongolism as a genetic disease.
How far will Google Search index the fatcat URL? Will they block it from results in due course, for being too verbose and swamping results? Or just tweak the de-duplication algorithm to suppress it a bit? Well, they’re indexing it for now, and as such it’s been experimentally added to JURN. It may well come out again, but I want to test it for a while. If Google Search fully indexes, that should theoretically then give JURN users a way into all the microfilm journal-runs that Archive.org that has recently been uploading.
28 Monday Sep 2020
Released in June 2020, a new consultancy report titled “Equitable access to research in a changing world: Research4Life Landscape and Situation Analysis”. This surveys the pressures on the Research4Life aid programmes. Established 20 years ago, Research4Life gives developing countries “free or low-cost” online access to journals and books from some 175 publishers. Along with other aid initiatives, this means that African universities often have better free access to journal databases than do some academics in advanced nations. The new report makes no recommendations, but a key point to note is that…
… some of the most relevant and influential research undertaken in low-and-middle income countries happens outside academia: in specialised research institutes, think tanks, or government-backed research agencies. In some countries, research agencies and institutes conduct research in national priority areas and have direct access to and influence on decision-makers” [yet] “these non-governmental organisations have in the past been excluded from open access debates, and may be unable to take advantage of initiatives such as Research4Life.
It could be useful to quantify that “may”, through further research. Do developing nations find roundabout ways to include their research agencies in Research4Life, such as giving off-campus agency researchers special log-ins to access the national university system? Or are such arrangements rather moot, in the age of open-access and Sci-hub? If not, would there be a real benefit if Research4Life were to be extended to bona fide government research agencies and suitable NGOs? How much would such an expansion actually cost, and what could the returns be in such nations?
04 Friday Sep 2020
Posted in Academic search, JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news
Update: DocFetcher Pro now available and stable at 31st May 2021, with embedded Java, for $40 via Gumroad.
The freeware desktop file-indexer and keyword searcher DocFetcher has been sporked by the Java runtime update, specifically failing to launch due to an error with the JIntellitype64.dll file. The code archive for this file suggests similar problems for others in the past. And the comments at SourceForge suggest other are finding the latest Java (mid July 2020) repeatedly crashes DocFetcher. Apparently it’s also causing problems for several other bits of software.
The fallback is not the official portable version of DocFetcher, sadly, which has the same problem. Nor is falling back to an earlier version of DocFetcher. Nor is the solution to download and install the latest 64-bit Java for Windows again. It appears that the old 32-bit software just doesn’t play nicely with the latest mid-July Java. This is confirmed by a comment buried on SourceForge from the developer…
“A proper bugfix for DocFetcher won’t be available until 2021, so for now downgrading to Java 8u251 is the only workaround”.
But by that time the software will be “DocFetcher Pro” and $50 paid for a perpetual licence. Ah well. Still, that’s good value compared to dtSearch, and is not a subscription like Copernic Desktop. But… $50. So, an alternative freeware option will soon be needed. I took a look…
1) There is Recoll on Windows, which looks like it’s halfway there, but it costs 5 Euros. That’s not viable if you were wanting to distribute a bit of full-text search freeware with the archive of a large defunct technical forum. Still, by 2021 it might have developed further. (Update: the maker has commented, noting it’s GPL and copies may be freely redistributed).
2) The developer of the freeware AnyTXT Searcher has been knocking the rough edges off it and expanding file types, over the last year. But, while it bills itself a “Google Desktop Search Alternative” is still appears not to have any sort of acceptable in-file preview on its search results. The other problem is that its start-up time is extremely slow. Several minutes, rather than seconds. You expect that of behemoths like Photoshop, but not of a little Windows utility. Plus it appears to be “all or nothing”, and there’s no ability to index just a few folders. Uninstalled.
3) Another possible choice is Exselo, said to be very powerful and yet also free desktop search. But… like DocFetcher it’s Java based. Plus, it’s Registerware and “Invites are sent to friends” (register via Facebook?). It’s a system-hog, and it stops working after 14 days if you don’t accept automatic updates. The developers were obviously hoping to sell it on, and lacking a buyer are now pitching it as a trendy “secure chat environment”? Blugh.
4) The old standby Copernic Desktop has become slightly better. The ‘last good’ wholly free version was 2.30 build 30 (no Deskbar feature on Windows 64-bit, PDF manual here). The current 2020 free version still has no .PDF or Word support, but the 10,000 file limit has now been raised to 25,000. It also has a new $15 “knowledge worker” edition, but that just turns out to be a “per-year subscription”. It’s now Registerware, even to just download the Trial. Also requires big .NET Framework downloads, which the 2.3 doesn’t. Thus it’s not feasible as freeware to distribute along with a large forum archive.
5) The old 2010 Multifind would be a good choice, if only it built an initial index and was thus fast. For some, the lack of a requirement to build an index may be a feature not a drawback. Despite its slowness due to a lack of an index, it can find and display text inside files. And it’s genuine old-school Windows freeware and has a tiny footprint. If you wanted to make something to fill the freeware gap that’s looming with the loss of DocFetcher, you might do worse than buy the rights to this and start developing it again.
So it’s back to DocFetcher. One can’t go back beyond DocFetcher 1.1.20, as that was when it started indexing HTML with no body element (e.g. RSS-feed forum-threads archived in XML and re-named .HTML), and anyway that doesn’t fix the problem. So it looks like the only real solution to get DocFetcher working is the downgrade to Java SE Runtime Environment 8u251 (jre-8u251-windows-x64.exe), which is a security risk unlikely to be welcomed by those who just want a free search tool for use with their forum archives. Perhaps what’s needed is to make a truly portable DocFetcher, which never has to call on the Windows system’s Java runtime?