25 Monday Feb 2019
Posted in JURN metrics
I’m pleased to say that jurn.org appears to have come out of ‘Google Search quarantine’ on 23rd February, a month after the domain was re-activated, and the traffic saw a big upward bounce.
02 Saturday Feb 2019
Posted in JURN metrics, My general observations
Super. I’ve realised, and just in time, that JURN is 10 years old tomorrow!
JURN was launched by me in working form on 3rd February 2009, and then went onto the new Jurn.org domain on 5th February 2009. Initially the search-tool only had a mere 951 arts and humanities journal titles, indexed and full-text searchable at the article level. The fledgling JURN Directory followed shortly after. JURN certainly wasn’t the search behemoth it is now, after a decade of often very intensive work on it, but the launch caused a ripple of interest and some enduring inbound links.
As users and readers of this blog will know, JURN has been constantly maintained, repaired and expanded since then. All the work has been done unpaid. Despite very sparse donations each year (some years with nothing at all), over a decade JURN has just about ‘broken even’ in terms of paying for domain and hosting costs.
Several new services have been added since launch, such as the comprehensive repository search GRAFT (‘Global Research Access, Full-Text’) and the OpenEco A-Z journal directory. The scope of JURN’s journal indexing has also expanded a little beyond arts and humanities journals, to strong coverage of business and law journals, and journals on all aspects of the natural world. As always, predatory titles and publishers are excluded.
JURN continues and OA continues to grow, so… onward to 2029!
20 Saturday Oct 2018
Posted in JURN metrics, New titles added to JURN
JURN’s entire URL list has now been checked, looking for continuing presence of the URL path on Google Search results. This is the annual re-check of the core list that drives JURN’s search results, not the approx. six-weekly re-check of the JURN Directory.
I checked the specific URL path being indexed, and not just the basic domain. For example, for ITJ: The Intel Technology Journal, the URL checked was http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/research/ rather than just http://www.intel.com.
Broken URLs were re-found and fixed, or deleted as required. Roughly 1 in every 50 URLs had broken.
30 Friday Mar 2018
Posted in JURN metrics, Ooops!
Ooops. ‘Figures’ pages were being indexed in JURN for the verbose biomedical full-text website ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Now they’re not, as I’ve excluded them.
Not that it mattered all that much, as they were being automatically suppressed by Google’s de-duplication and results ranking. In some cases Google appears to avoid ncbi.nlm.nih.gov altogether in favour of full-text at a better source repository. For instance, search JURN for the URL https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc3566601/ and find a link to the article at NCBI, but search for the same article’s title and Google ranks its MIT repository location as the first result — and ignores NCBI because it’s deemed a duplicate of the more worthy MIT.
02 Tuesday Jan 2018
Posted in JURN metrics
Number of journals which this blog noted as newly added to JURN, in 2017: 302.
This compares to 340 English-language journals added to JURN in 2016, so the total is slightly down on 2016. The total wasn’t inflated by a blithe shovel-ware approach, and JURN remains highly curated and monitored.
Perhaps 40% of the newly added titles were in various fields that map onto ‘ecology/nature’, making JURN’s openEco coverage even more comprehensive. Perhaps 10% of 2017’s new titles were gathered to provide an even more comprehensive coverage of national security and defence journals. Of the rest, the majority were arts and humanities, with history featuring fairly strongly.
07 Tuesday Nov 2017
Posted in JURN metrics, New titles added to JURN
JURN’s GRAFT repository search tool updated today, with a freshly added additional list of new repository URLs. The total now stands at 4,520 repositories made searchable.
Unlike JURN, GRAFT searches across records and full-text alike. Which means… It’s Big. So it’s not much use just tapping in a few keywords and hoping for the best. It’s ideally used with relatively sophisticated search modifiers and a few seconds of pre-planning.
By the way, if you’re wondering: “why call it GRAFT”? Global Repository Access Full-Text = GRAFT.
05 Thursday Oct 2017
Posted in JURN metrics
JURN’s 800-journal openEco directory has been checked for linkrot, and the links repaired or deleted if required.
04 Sunday Jun 2017
Posted in JURN metrics, My general observations
JURN’s GRAFT repository search tool has updated. I cleaned out several hundred dead ‘site not found’ URLs which had crept in since last summer, and fixed a surprising amount of re-directs to new repo domain names (I thought these things were supposed to stay put). And that was on what was a thoroughly cleaned and checked URL list. I’ve also added around 100 recently-announced repositories. Even after the removals and fixes the current tally of URLs still sees GRAFT searching across around 1,300 more repositories than OpenDOAR’s 3,300 (their latest figures).
Unlike JURN, GRAFT searches across records and full-text alike. Which means… It’s Big, so it’s not much use just tapping in a few keywords and hoping for the best. It’s ideally used with relatively sophisticated search modifiers and a few seconds of pre-planning.
25 Tuesday Apr 2017
Posted in JURN metrics, Spotted in the news
Another screenshot that gives an up-to-date glimpse of the universities-only oaFindr service, in action. In this case it’s from ETH Zurich, which has a trial running with its students…
In JURN, for same search, slightly more results. Plus Google’s leading relevancy-ranking…
Of course, it’s going to help if you at least try to do a search using basic quote marks: solar “cosmic rays” gets 290,000 results. solar “cosmic rays” troposphere whittles it down to a mere 24,500.
Update, Nov 2017: OAFindr is now called 1Findr.
16 Friday Dec 2016
Posted in JURN metrics, New titles added to JURN
For those interested in end-of-year OA tallies, I can report that this blog recorded a total of 340 journals added to JURN in 2016. Nearly all those titles publish in English on topics in the humanities or the natural world. If the 340 were combined with the worthy foreign language journals URLs also added in 2016, then the total OA journals added to JURN might be around 500. Which means it’s been a somewhat slower year than 2015, which added 450 new titles published in English.