Category Archives: How to improve academic search

Feed me

25 Wednesday Nov 2009

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The commercial journal publishers provide sound RSS feeds by default, enabling complex services such as Journal TOCs. But there’s a distinct lack of RSS feeds from open access ejournals (even those using dedicated journal software) and other free ejournals. For instance, I did a quick RSS harvest of the Archaeology and Classical Civilisations sections in the JURN Directory, and came up with a pitifully small list of valid feeds…

http://www.ajaonline.org/rss.xml

http://arche.bymedia.net/arche.rss

http://www.archaeology.org/rss.xml

http://intarch.ac.uk/content.rdf

http://www.palarch.nl/feed/

http://www.byzsym.org/index.php/bz/gateway/plugin/WebFeedGatewayPlugin/rss2

http://scholarworks.umass.edu/etruscan_studies/recent.rss

http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~lingaeg/rss/rssfeed.xml

http://nome.unak.is/nome2/feed.xml

http://www.palarch.nl/feed/

http://scholarworks.umass.edu/rasenna/recent.rss

http://pompeiiana.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/classicsjournal/recent.rss

…so it hardly seems worth using something like rFeedfinder to harvest all the auto-discoverable RSS feeds for JURN’s Directory. The lack of feeds would appear to be one of the major failings of the online provision of free scholarly articles.

feed:bing

25 Wednesday Nov 2009

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Nice. Here’s a useful Bing search modifier that Google doesn’t have…

feed:keyword

…finds only RSS feeds.

In Google you’d have to use this sort of roundabout method…

inurl:rss keyword

inurl:feed keyword

Or chain the two main types together with all the minor possibilities such as rdf…

inurl:rss OR inurl:feed OR inurl:rdf keyword

Google can also do (albiet while triggering annoying ‘are you a robot?’ captchas)…
‘

filetype:rss keyword

… which discovers a lot, but obviously not everything. So then you would need to use filetype:xml — and that would bring in all sorts of things which are not RSS feeds. Chaining inurl: seems the better option.

A simple universal comprehensive blog search, like the old Technorati, would be the better solution. But it seems no-one wants to build one, for some unknown reason.

Broken links, un-broken

22 Sunday Nov 2009

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

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Hopefully they’ll make this software available to all…

“Broken links will soon be a thing of the past for UK government websites, as The National Archives launches its unique Web Continuity project. The first of its kind anywhere in the world, the project has already enabled millions of people using government websites to find information which would previously have been lost through broken web links. The service is now leading to more than six million redirected hits a month. Six government departments have already installed the software, but the Web Continuity project is due to be formally launched at the House of Lords on 2 December 2009″ […] The software enables users who click on a link that is no longer live to be taken automatically to where the information they need is held in The National Archives’ UK Government Web Archive. The web archive regularly captures and preserves 1,500 government websites for posterity.”

      [ Hat-tip: Peter Scott ]

e-book discovery and visibility

19 Thursday Nov 2009

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4 Principles for E-book Discovery & Visibility, notes from a recent U.S. talk by Anh Bui (of HighWire Press)…

“Users understand book and journal content is different, but that line is blurring; take advantage of the traffic already flowing to journal content. Librarians talk about purchasing continuations or not-continuations; no longer referring to journals and books.”

ELPUB 2009 papers now online

31 Friday Jul 2009

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

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Full-text papers and Powerpoints from ELPUB 2009 : 13th International Conference on Electronic Publishing are now freely available online.

Lots of titles that sound interesting, including: ‘Overlay Publications: a functional overview of the concept’; ‘Targeted knowledge: interaction and rich user experience towards a scholarly communication that “lets”‘; ‘Incorporating Semantics and Metadata as Part of the Article Authoring Process’; and ‘Electronic publishing and bibliometrics’.

One short strand of the presentation ‘Electronic publishing and bibliometrics’ (.PPT) is summarised by Moitara’s blog which reposts a D-lib conference report, thus…

“discussed in Moed’s keynote speech was assessment in the area of the humanities where there is a lack of reference indexes such as Scopus or Web of Science, due to the different types of research, outcomes and habits between the humanities and science communities. Moed explored five different options for the creation of a comprehensive database for the humanities and social sciences, including combining a number of existing European special SSH bibliographies, creating a new database from publishers’ archives, stimulating further enhancement of Web of Science and Scopus, exploring the potentialities and limitations of Google Scholar and Google Book Search, and creating a citation index from institutional repositories. Much work must be done in these fields, but the availability of full-text seems to be a key issue.” (My emphasis)

The first part of this presentation also has an interesting graph, showing how the RAE in the UK severely skews the output of academic papers…

uk-article-output-86-03
            from: Moed (2009). “Electronic publishing and bibliometrics” (.PPT)

The e-journals revolution: podcast

29 Wednesday Jul 2009

Posted by in Academic search, How to improve academic search, Official and think-tank reports, Spotted in the news

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If you couldn’t be at the recent Research Information Network meeting in London, “The e-journals revolution: how the use of scholarly journals is shaping research”, then RIN has kindly provided a 28 minute “edited highlights” podcast for free.

A delicious little snippet…

“Government researchers search the least. They switch off at Friday lunchtime and don’t come back until Monday lunchtime”

Page Hunt

28 Tuesday Jul 2009

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Microsoft turns search into a game called Page Hunt. All in the name of science, of course. Page Hunt ask players to ensures a certain page lands in the top five results…

“the game presents players with web pages and asks them to guess the queries that would produce the page within its first five results. Players score 100 points if the page is no.1 on the list, 90 points if it’s no.2, and so on. Bonuses are also awarded for avoiding frequently-used queries.”

Not quite as gripping as the sublime Plants vs. Zombies, but it has some rough-edged charm. And there’s one curious finding already:

“…the longer a page’s URL (in characters), the harder it was for users to match the page to query words. The research doesn’t speculate about why this should be, but here’s a graph showing the relationship between URL length and the ‘findability’ of a page.”

Perhaps there’s a lesson here for those who use ridiculously long and impenetrable scripted URLs?

Spezify

15 Wednesday Jul 2009

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

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I can’t remember the last time I saw a new search-engine that more than mildly impressed me (*), but the just-launched Spezify is impressive and different. It’s primarily a visual search-engine aimed at designers and creatives, but also slips in relevant text and audio links. I gave it a tough one: Mongolian folk song, and it delivered very well…

spezify

Yes, those are the results! And, as I know this search inside-out, I’d say they’re a reasonably strong and relevant set of results. It seems to be aggregating Yahoo / Bing / YouTube, maybe even Google, but it’s refreshing to see the way the results are mixed and presented. I can see my Visual Communications and Fine Arts students flocking to this.

Sadly, there’s no Firefox search-box addon yet.

    * (Actually it was probably We feel fine)