Category Archives: How to improve academic search

Researcher to Reader conference

08 Friday Mar 2024

Posted by in Academic search, How to improve academic search, Open Access publishing, Spotted in the news

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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?

Another rummage among the RSS readers

27 Friday Jan 2023

Posted by in How to improve academic search

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Great to see that the old SeaMonkey freeware has re-started development, and since Spring 2020 has been vigorously releasing updates. Old-school Internet users will recall this suite from the Netscape / Yahoo years. It’s an all-in-one software with a Web browser (now Firefox based), email client, newsgroup and RSS readers, HTML editor with javascript debugger, and IRC chat. The only thing it seems to lack is FTP, but these days you might be more likely to do that through a Web dashboard. And if you really need it, the browser plugin FireFTP is compatible.

Runs on Linux. Mac, Windows 7 and higher.

Regrettably it can’t just be used as desktop RSS reader, as that’s integrated with Mail and not in its own panel. Nor, so far as I can tell or find, does SeaMonkey yet have a Dark Mode — except for the Web browser via a plugin. Both of which are deal-breakers for me.

However, the search did make me aware that several Web browsers are now shipping an RSS feedreader in the default package, or plan to…

* The Vivaldi browser already has a nice one, though limited and not standalone (it’s inside Vivaldi Mail).

* Google Chrome announced in August a planned port of their Android Chrome RSS feedreader to the desktop version of the browser. Though probably only as a side-panel. So far as I can tell from news searches, it hasn’t happened yet.

* Brave’s “privacy-preserving newsreader” still doesn’t appear to have a desktop version, despite promises back in the summer.

My search of news also brought details of changes in standalone desktop readers, gHacks reports this week that RSS Guard update brings massive performance boost. It appears to have caught up with the No.1 RSS desktop freeware QuiteRSS (development stalled), at least in speed, by introducing parallel feed updating. You can also now block all cookies (Top menu-bar | Tools | Settings | Network | “Do not accept …”).

So I tried it. Installed. Lovely dark mode, easily applied. Turned off all cookies. I was then utterly stumped as to how to import the OPML. Turns out it’s completely impossible to import an OPML, if you skip past the popup window at the start. But then my anti-virus did its own pop-up and blocked RSS Guard, anyway. It was a very generic detection and I permitted it, reluctantly. Uninstalled, reinstalled, and this time an OPML import option was offered on startup. But then it fatally crashed when it went to load the OPML feed-bundle. Oh well, RSS Guard looked slick and sounded fast but… uninstalled. No good.

So… for now the old QuiteRSS is still the best there is on the Windows desktop.

Missing in open

27 Sunday Jun 2021

Posted by in How to improve academic search, Spotted in the news

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Google Scholar has a useful new feature. If an article was funded from the public purse, and yet not freely published online with the agreed time, then Scholar will flag that the expected public open access version is missing.

However the flags appear on the Scholar Profile section, not as a red flag alongside each search result.

Taking a purely random example, this is what appears on the sidebar of the author’s page…

On clicking through from this widget, one gets a list with the missing papers sorted to the top…

You can see that the OA mandates are usefully itemised per-paper.

One-click to remove a verbose site from Google

11 Thursday Mar 2021

Posted by in How to improve academic search, JURN tips and tricks

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One-click to remove a verbose site from Google Search results, a new UserScript. Preset for Wikipedia, but the URL can be easily changed to be any verbose website. It should ideally be a website that you usually regularly want to remove from search results, but sometimes want to keep. The script is thus more flexible than a regular list-based site blocker.

It works by re-running the current search, but only an instant after some regex has cunningly inserted the command    into the URL.

Also, yes, I’m aware that my ‘add JURN as a link to Google Search’ UserScript has stopped working. Google has re-labelled the divs on the text links just below the search box. A similar script that allows the current search to be passed to Scholar has also stopped working, as have several similar menu scripts. I’m waiting for one of these scripts to update, and thus to show me how it needs to be fixed.

Towards a meta-pedia browser add-on

11 Thursday Jun 2020

Posted by in Academic search, How to improve academic search

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An interesting idea: a meta-pedia browser add-on, to consult all public encyclopedias at the same time. Presenting the results as an elegant full-screen dashboard with a strip of side-links to Google Books, Archive.org, Scholar, JURN etc. Ideally with configurable sources…

* Wikipedia
* Current Britannica
* 1911 Britannica
* Specialist public encyclopedias is they exist for the topic, e.g. Philosophy, Catholic, Science-fiction etc.

I’m assuming this would need to be a browser add-on, as a cloud service that did this would face lawsuits and frame-busting scripts. The closest I can find is 2019’s free ResearchKit which shows Wikipedia and the current Britannica side-by-side, above bot-driven auto-summaries of their text. It’s not exactly elegant to look at it, but it works.

Obviously some fuzzy-lookup might be needed to align search topics, though the individual encyclopedias strive to do that on their pages via navigation strips and links.

But rather than jumping straight to a presumed page, perhaps each encyclopedia panel might first show sub-panels with a half-dozen ‘possible’ hits, colour-shaded by order of likely relevance to the search. If such a browser addon was in widespread use, the data gathered from such mass human-driven topic-selection/alignment might be rather useful, over time being judiciously used to augment existing ‘knowledge navigation trees’ that are able to cope at a meta-level with shifting topic titles (e.g. Aetheopia > Abyssinia > Horn of Africa > Eastern Africa > Ethiopia).

Another way to do it might be for the addon to ‘read’ such existing navigation on the encyclopedia pages, make its own deft distillation of such, and then use that to ‘prime’ with keywords the sidebar links to Google Books, Archive.org, Scholar, JURN etc.

On auto-downloading open access books

21 Tuesday Apr 2020

Posted by in How to improve academic search, My general observations, Spotted in the news

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Martin Paul Eve has a new post on Zotero and auto-downloading open access books…

all I really wanted was to be able to embed an ISBN and a citation_pdf_url and have Zotero do the lookup and save the file. However, out of the box there is no easy way to do this.

His test book is quite interesting, his own new Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (April 2020), which applies textual computing to the science-fiction-philosophy novel Cloud Atlas.

I don’t know about or use the current version of Zotero, so I’m unsure what advantages it confers. I assume Eve intended to find a way to automatically harvest all CC-SA books in PDF, and build a local collection for automated analysis.

But I see his book is already on the OA book aggregator catalogue OAPEN. Theoretically then, since OAPEN is comprehensive and timely, one could have a harvester look at all the pages hanging off library.oapen.org/handle/ and save out only those pages with the required permissive CC “Rights” label on them. These pages each have a uniform PDF link URL in their HTML, in the form of library.oapen.org/bitstream/ and these could be easily extracted to a list. One would end up with a set of PDF links for a linkbot, ready to download to a local folder for computational analysis. I presume that’s what Eve intended to have Zotero do.

One would need to reference the OAPEN record page first, in the way I’ve suggested, since the PDF itself can have different or non-uniform or contradictory licence information. For instance in its interior Eve’s book is labelled as both “©” … “No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.” and also “Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0”.

How many items on OAPEN have a creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/ “Rights” label at present, as Martin’s book does? A Google site: search suggests around 650 titles. Half an hour of my filtering the OAPEN CSV suggests it’s actually just over 3,000 under some form of permissive CC that permits commercial use. That’s still a manageable harvest at present. But as the supply of OA books and monographs grows rapidly, the likely result of various OA mandates in the near-future, it might be a useful time-saver for text-miners and digital humanists if OAPEN were to maintain a single torrent of all the PDFs. Inside which a half dozen folders would neatly organise the books by CC licence type. Such a one-click solution might save a lot of faffing around with digging into and filtering their XML and CSV feeds, wrangling with harvester scripts and timeouts, or trying to wrestle with third-party services such as Zotero. A torrent could also save OAPEN’s bandwidth.

Global leaders ask publishers to make “all COVID-19 research … immediately available to the public”

14 Saturday Mar 2020

Posted by in How to improve academic search, Spotted in the news

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Issued yesterday from President Trump’s office, but so far unreported in the virus news I’ve seen…

“The U.S. Coronavirus Task Force leader, Dr. Kelvin Droegemeier, and government science leaders including science ministers and chief science advisors from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United Kingdom are asking publishers to make all COVID-19-related research and data immediately available to the public. … Science leaders requested that existing and new articles be made available in machine-readable format to allow full text and data mining with rights accorded for research re-use and secondary analysis.”