In the first half of 2016 JURN added 210 new journal titles (published in English) to the search index.

Looking at the stats today, it appears that JURN’s search functions were offline / unreachable on Monday night, for around three hours from 6pm to 9pm.

Over the last six weeks JURN has added indexing for 200+ new open/free titles published in English, plus about 15 caches of open books and monographs.

So, how did JURN do in 2014? A quick summary:

* Journals added (in English): I count about 380 linked via the blog. Not counting the Paperity range of titles, or the big influx of ecology related journals.

* Journals added (non-English): I don’t keep count of these via the blog. But I’d guestimate over 100, all titles in the arts and humanities.

* There will have been a natural but uncounted rise, via incremental additions to the non-English journal aggregators. Such as CiNii, Revues, Dialnet etc, which JURN indexes.

* Expanded via the addition of over 250 open ecology related journals, and all known related subject repositories from marine science to ornithology.

* Expanded via incorporating my defunct FUSE business search tool into JURN, adding about 50 selected business journal titles, plus a variety of law titles.

* Expanded to cover science and biomedical, mostly via indexing reputable mega-aggregators of open science articles.

* Direct indexing of PDFs held in all of the UK’s notable full-text university repositories, plus PDFs in the larger full-text repositories in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Other nations also had major repositories added (Nairobi, Kenya for instance), but not in a systematic way. This duplicates CORE somewhat, but provides a useful alternative source for the CSE to draw on for results.

* Direct indexing of the PDFs at many newly discovered subject repositories (from the Getty Virtual Library through the U.S. Air Force Historical Studies Office).

* I ‘opened up the throttle’ on previously indexed dspace / digitalcommons / scholarworks repository URLs, to target all PDFs there (rather than just those of a specific journal).

* A complete close hand-and-eye scrutiny and weeding of the complete spreadsheet of indexed URLs, which took about a month.

* A complete automated checking of all URLs for ongoing appearance on Google Search.

* Ongoing removal of open titles found to be ‘404’ dead or spirited away to a paywall publisher (it happens).

* Ongoing monitoring of the evidence for claims about allegedly ‘questionable’ and ‘predatory’ journals. I find Beall’s evidence on MDPI and ANSINetwork to be lacking, and these publishers are included in JURN (as they are in the DOAJ).

* Ongoing testing of the search results given by JURN.

* A back-end code overhaul for the main landing page and results page at www.jurn.org

* The DOAJ static article records were lost by early 2014. But I was able to get the DOAJ back in again, if only through a clunky indexing at the article title level.

* Severely trimmed back coverage of academia.edu, keeping only the thematic article lists via the URL http://www.academia.edu/Documents/in/*_* (* = wildcards)

Another group test:

Overall, all the search engines tested here struggled with this search, though might have done better with additional keywords.

Google Books also struggled somewhat with this test, picking up only three titles with free preview pages. However, it may interest readers to see the full list of titles found by Google Books:

  The Reception of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey.
  The Critical Reception and Parodies of Tristram Shandy.
  Shandymania (actually a thesis).
  A Culture of Mimicry: Laurence Sterne, His Readers and the Art of Bodysnatching.
  Laurence Sterne in Modernism and Postmodernism.
  The Reception of Laurence Sterne in Europe.
  Labyrinth of Digressions: Tristram Shandy as Perceived and Influenced by Sterne’s Early Imitators.

Compare this with the following additional book titles which were discovered by Amazon UK:

  Adaptations of Laurence Sterne’s Fiction.
  Laurence Sterne in France (Continuum Reception Studies).
  Sterne: The Critical Heritage.
  Yorick and the Critics: Sterne’s Reputation in England, 1760-1868.
  Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel.
  The Plagiarism Allegation in English Literature from Butler to Sterne.

WorldCat was able to pick up two additional book titles to add to the above lists, of six titles found in total:

  * Turning into Sterne: Viktor Shklovskii and literary reception.
  * The Created Self : the reader’s role in eighteenth-century fiction.
  The critical reception and parodies of Tristram Shandy.
  The reception of Tristram Shandy and A sentimental journey in France, 1760-1800.
  Laurence Sterne in France (Continuum Reception Studies).
  Reception of Laurence Sterne in Europe.

So Google Books, Amazon UK, and WorldCat proved a useful trio for quick initial location of likely book titles. With the added advantage that some of the titles found by Google Books and Amazon offer free previews of pages or even whole chapters.

Not all is as it seems, however. The seemingly spot-on The Critical Reception and Parodies of Tristram Shandy (1950) appears to be a ‘ghost’ book, being a database record generated by a long-lost 1950 Masters disseration at Columbia University NYC written by Gloria P. Freeman. So no chance of getting that one cheap on Amazon for $2.

In its first 50 results Summon (limited to: Books | in English | Criticism or History) only managed to pick up three suitable titles: Labyrinth of digressions: Tristram Shandy as perceived and influenced by Sterne’s Early imitators; and Turning into Sterne: Viktor Shklovskii and literary reception; and Laurence Sterne in France (Continuum Reception Studies).

The British Library catalogue could only turn up two books in two results, The reception of Tristram Shandy and A sentimental journey in France, 1760-1800 (in its thesis form), and Turning into Sterne : Viktor Shklovskii and literary reception.