The new Journal TOCs search tool allows you to…

“…search the latest Table of Contents (TOCs) of 12,568 journals collected from 422 publishers. More journals are added continuously. You can start by searching for TOCs by journal title or by keywords (searching 336,025 TOC articles). You also can browse TOCs by publisher or by subject. Then, if you click on a journal title, the latest Table of Contents will be displayed.”

Seemingly recently launched without any marketing buzz (not a single blog seems to have linked to it before now), it appears to arise from the “TicTOCs” RSS aggregation service. It’s run by the same people as TicTOCs — Santy Chumbe and Lisa Rogers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. According to the departmental home page, the £200k two-year TicTOCs is now a “past project” and is dated as having completed in 2009.

Testing the new Journal TOCs with a sample of titles listed by the JURN Directory: such as Comitatus; Museum and Society; ImageTexT; Culture Machine, gives no results. This indicates that Journal TOCs is largely indexing commercial titles, presumably via standard RSS feeds. Although free titles from the French revues.org ejournal repository service are included, presumably because standard RSS feeds are to be had.

The old TicTOCs also has search, but its search function is possibly no longer being updated — the database on Journal TOCs appears to be more up-to-date, with my test search bringing results from June 09 which are not to be had from the same search on TicTOCs.

The HathiTrust now has a live 0.2 beta version of its impending books and journals bibliographic search. They currently have records for around 4.5 million titles, including 708,118 in the public domain (inc. the Internet Archive books and journals, which they have ingested). A breakdown of the holdings by academic discipline is here. Some of the blurb underneath the beta’s search box seems to come from May 2009, and is out-of-date.

So that’s where the mainland Chinese journals are. The China National Knowledge Infrastructure: Chinese Academic Journals (CAJ) apparently contains ‘hard’ scanned images of pages… (thus making them invisible to search-engines) “from 1,856 print journals in the humanities. Access requires a password.” The main CNKI archive apparently totals 7,200 journals across all disciplines including science, when journals from 1915-1994 are counted in. Since no other mainland arts/humanities journals seem to be visible to Google, the government must be requiring scholars to publish online only in the gulag CAJ.

Seemingly just launched, Microsoft Academic Search is now in a live public beta. Currently very technology and computing oriented, MAS doesn’t seem to be any kind of competitor to JURN for searching the full-text of arts and humanities ejournals.

The way that MAS can visualise links between authors is certainly an interesting advance…