Category Archives: Academic search

Mind the Watford Gap

01 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by in Academic search, Spotted in the news

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Cameron Neylon has rustled up a useful map of the public libraries in the UK which are set to offer free access to 8,000 commercial paywalled academic ejournals…

journals_via_public_libraries_uk_2014

Very nice if you’re in the leafy Home Counties around London, not so useful for those in the industrial Midlands or the North. Although the use terms (“I can only use accessed information for non-commercial research and private study”) make such business access moot for people such as the cybersecurity boffins of Malvern or the ceramics R&D teams of Stoke-on-Trent.

Oh well, there’s always JURN, now with added business and science goodness.

ROAD

19 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by in Academic search

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ROAD is a new unified ISSN lookup tool, apparently from UNESCO, drawing records from a handful of big databases. What makes it notable is that search results only show records of open access titles. ROAD looks like it might be useful for finding out what’s currently listed where, e.g.: what open access title is in Scopus but is not yet in the DOAJ. ROAD also gives ISSN records that are otherwise held behind paywalls, in databases such as ISSN Register (with which ROAD appears to be associated).

Drilling down through the sidebar filters shows ROAD listing only 338 titles in the Arts and Humanities + published in English, despite its accessing the DOAJ and many other databases. Odd.

OAN

18 Saturday Jan 2014

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I found a German search-engine for material in repositories, OAN. The precision of its single-box keyword search is very poor, at least when using the English language. But OAN does have the ability to filter down to records for periodical articles only, and then to filter these records again by broad subject area. OAN also seems to have made a very strong effort to only include repository records that actually lead to full-text.

Gigablast goes open source

31 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Academic search, Spotted in the news

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The Gigablast search-engine has open sourced its search-engine code and technology at GutHub…

“An open source web and enterprise search engine for Linux on Intel/AMD. Currently in use on Gigablast.com. A robust, scalable search solution in 100% custom C/C++ that has
been in development and used commercially since 2000. Distributed web crawler. Supports any document conversion plugin to convert PDF, etc. to HTML”

Code currently lacking, though, any “Boolean query support”. That probably doesn’t matter, though, since only a miniscule fraction of seachers actually use Boolean.

JSTOR free Register & Read expands to 1,200 titles

10 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by in Academic search, Spotted in the news

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JSTOR’s Register & Read beta service has been letting anyone sign up to read up to three JSTOR articles per fortnight, for free. Just to read, mind you — not to download or copy-and-paste. Until now R&R access has been to a mere 77 journals.

But a new Jan 2013 press release proclaims a much meatier “1,200 journals” for the R&R offer…

“more than 1,200 journals [titles .xls] are now available for limited reading by the public. This is part of a major expansion of JSTOR’s experimental program Register & Read…”

R&R access can be had by registering for a MyJSTOR account.

If you need to quote from an R&R article, don’t struggle with retyping the quote into your essay. The Microsoft Office 2007 OneNote ‘screen clipping’ OCR function is your friend, in such cases. OneNote works extremely well at “reading” screengrab images and turning them into editable text, even when the text is very small and a bit rough…

clipping

copytext

New “Recently available via JURN Search…” rss-powered page

09 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Academic search, My general observations

≈ 2 Comments

Announcing a new JURN tool: the “Recently available via JURN Search…” page. 180 viable/active RSS feeds, discovered via delving into the 3,000 links on the JURN Directory, and then tied into some whizz-bang Web code. The page only shows the most recent article per journal, then it re-sorts the whole list by date. Without a wider use of RSS among open access ejournals, this page is as near as JURN can get to a “new issue alerts” service, let alone a full TOCs service. It’ll be tweaked and improved over the coming months. Enjoy…

recentjurn

Yes, statistics hounds: only 180 decent RSS feeds after weeding, from 3,000 links. It puts the number of free/open arts and humanities ejournals using RSS autodiscovery at about 6%. In the coming weeks I’ll be doing some Google searching for filetype:rss etc, to see if I can manually discover more. Update: added another 42 feeds.

ctrlQ

08 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Academic search, How to improve academic search

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The nice little niche search-engine ctrlQ: RSS Search Engine displays “full URL” RSS feed links, as part of the search results. Another, Search4RSS is similar. Not sure if they just do basic RSS autodiscover, or if they’re also delving deeper looking for .rdf, .rss links etc. It would be great if this functionality was also in the main Google Search results, perhaps via a Greasemonkey script?

rss

List of open ejournals in Scopus, and WoS

06 Sunday Jan 2013

Posted by in Academic search

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A handy new combo list of the open ejournal titles included in PubMed, Scopus and the ISI Master Journal List…

  Languages and Literatures: 280
  History and Archaeology: 198
  Philosophy and Religion: 162
  Communication and Information: 145
  Arts and Architecture: 137
  General and Multidisciplinary: 43

  Total of the above, at Dec 2012: 965.

As for the omitted Web of Science, the last I heard was that at the end of May 2011 the Transforming Scholarly Communication blog had posted a list (my .xls version) of all open access titles in WoS, showing that…

“The Web of Science database (including Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index, and Social Sciences Citation Index) now indexes close to 1,000 peer-reviewed open access titles”.

But I just found a paper published in 2012, “Challenges for open access journals”, which gave a figure of… “864 open access journals” in arts and humanities in Web of Science.