A report on JISC Discovery 2012 (11th Jan 2012).
JISC Discovery report
23 Monday Jan 2012
Category Archives: Academic search
Simple DOI-to-citation service
18 Wednesday Jan 2012
Posted in Academic search
New from Crossref, a simple web query interface (running off citeproc.js) that automatically turns any cryptic DOI (e.g.: 10.1112/plms/s2-43.6.544 ) into a usable short bibliographic entry.
JSTOR taking first steps to freedom
14 Saturday Jan 2012
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
The paywalled JSTOR service is set to offer 70 of its 1,400 journals for free, albeit hedged around with restrictions. But…
“if it works out, JSTOR says, it could expand the program to most or nearly all of the database” […] says it has been turning people away from seeing an article 150 million times a year”
The service already offers public-domain articles (before 1923) for free.
Bots for scholars
12 Thursday Jan 2012
Some interesting new data mining projects are shortly to get underway. They’re aimed at making ‘smart’ software bots that make life easier for researchers…
* automated tracking/mapping of topic lifecycles, across all forms of scholarly discussion
* automatic identifying of common forms of argument used in different disciplines
* software to automatically generate Dewey Decimal Classification-based tags from existing repository metadata
* software to automatically generate links to texts discussing the same persons, places and events
I’d say No.3 has a good chance of success.
A Comparative Study of the Indexing of Open Access Art Journals
07 Saturday Jan 2012
Posted in Academic search, Open Access publishing, Spotted in the news
An interesting new Nov 2011 journal article…
Sian Evans, Hilary Thompson, and Alex Watkins. “Discovering Open Access Art History: A Comparative Study of the Indexing of Open Access Art Journals” (PDF full-text link).
The researchers found 30 art history titles listed in the DOAJ directory. They then looked for the presence of these in Art Full Text, ARTbibliographies Modern, Art & Architecture Complete, and Bibliography of the History of Art / International Bibliography of Art. They found that only 6 of the 30 DOAJ titles were being indexed by these commercial databases. But half the time the actual full-text article was still inaccessible…
“50% of the time [in the commercial databases] there was no indication that the article could be read for free, nor was the full text provided”
By contrast, Google Scholar indexed 15 of the 30 DOAJ art history titles, and provided handy click-through links to full-text articles, albeit at the price of jumbling them in among results from a host of paywalled results drawn from commercial databases, Google Books, and the like.
Of course, JURN indexes all 30 — and the JURN Directory currently links to more than 60 titles in the art history category. Plus journals in museology and heritage conservation, and also the wider collection of history journals.
It was also interesting to read in the article that…
“No study regarding the indexing of open access journals has yet been conducted in the arts”.
Is there really not a single librarian, or even an OA advocate, in the entire world who is or has been interested in such matters?
Sadly, the authors find that…
“the vast majority of open access art scholarship remains undiscoverable for specialists in the field.”
University libraries, student research culture, and Google use
01 Sunday Jan 2012
Published at the end of September 2011, the book College Libraries and Student Culture: What We Now Know (ALA Editions). This from the Inside Higher Ed coverage of the research in the run-up to publication…
“… the Illinois researchers found something they did not expect: students were not very good at using Google. They were basically clueless about the logic underlying how the search engine organizes and displays its results. Consequently, the students did not know how to build a search that would return good sources. (For instance, limiting a search to news articles, or querying specific databases such as Google Book Search or Google Scholar.) Duke and Asher said they were surprised by “the extent to which students appeared to lack even some of the most basic information literacy skills that we assumed they would have mastered in high school.” Even students who were high achievers in high school suffered from these deficiencies, Asher told Inside Higher Ed in an interview.”
Seriously, they were surprised? Surely anyone who teaches undergraduates could have told them this?
Academic tool attracts $4.5m venture capital money
15 Thursday Dec 2011
Aaron Saenz at Singularity Hub has an excellent long analysis of why anyone would want to give Academia.edu an injection of $4.5m of venture funds (which they just did). The payoff seems to be the ability for large research investors to spot leading-edge emerging trends and topics in the crunched statistics. Statistics that can potentially stream out from sites such as Academia.edu, arXiv.org, Mendeley, and ResearchGate. And, as noted here on the JURN blog, Microsoft’s academic search seems to be headed the same social-network-y way, albeit at Microsoft’s usual glacial pace. Google Scholar responded nippily to Microsoft’s changes just a few days later. Such social networking -based data extractions have dangers, of course, in terms of pushing research funding further toward a lurching playground-like game of “follow my leader”. I daresay that process happens informally anyway, at conferences and in forums, but one has to worry about the valuable proto-research that might get trampled underfoot (or quietly whisked off to China) in such tech-accelerated stampedes.
Microsoft Academic Search adds arts & humanities
15 Tuesday Nov 2011
Posted in Academic search
Microsoft’s Bing seems to have radically expanded its specialist academic journal search engine, since the late summer of 2011. It now claims to index over 1,102,000 publications in the arts and humanities…
… however, I found its search results sparse and all paywalled. Judging from a few test keyword searches, it’s only hooks into the ‘big beast’ services of the likes of Informaworld, Muse, and Oxford Journals. Even a search for something quite wide such as gothic + novel gave me just 38 results, all paywalled. I had nothing for Mongolian + folk + song. I would have expected more, considering it’s indexing the likes of Oxford Journals. So for now it seems there’s not much reason to shun your university access, Google Scholar, or JURN. The page design is also a bit ‘Microsoft clunk’, and it demands Silverlight (Microsoft’s version of Flash)…
But… there are some nice touches. Journals have their own pages, telling you what dates are being used by Microsoft Academic Search. You can limit results by knowledge type (i.e.: only arts and humanities) and there is a Google Scholar -like citation index on the page for each result. Academic authors can seemingly get name authority, by bagging their own name and page. That latter point makes me kind of see where they might be going with it. In time, not just a search-engine — but something based more around individual scholars and their work?
DOAJ article-level indexing leaps over 3,000 journals
19 Monday Sep 2011
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) team leaps over the “3,000 journals indexed at article level” line. The press release was actually for 7,000 in the Directory listings, but only 45% of these are indexed/searchable at article level. Hence the DOAJ is now at about 3,100 in terms of being a search tool, and must have crossed the 3,000 line sometime in the late summer.
At current count, 905 of the Directory records are for journals in the arts and humanities (1081 if you include linguistics), with an unknown number of that subset searchable at article level. If the “45% indexed” figure holds true for arts and humanities, the DOAJ might be searching around 450 such journals at the article level.
JSTOR free before 1923
12 Monday Sep 2011
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
JSTOR are offering free worldwide access to journal articles published in the USA before 1923. This is 6% of JSTOR’s content. No log-in required, no Hathi-like fuss about “which country are you in, because your government might have passed a ridiculously extended copyright law”. Just go to Advanced Search, tick the box for “Include only content I can access”…
