In the first half of 2016 JURN added 210 new journal titles (published in English) to the search index.
Half-yearly tally for JURN
18 Saturday Jun 2016
Posted in JURN metrics
Category Archives: JURN metrics
Added to JURN
16 Saturday Apr 2016
Posted in Ecology additions, JURN metrics, New titles added to JURN
Frontiers of Biogeography (International Biogeography Society. Not to be confused with a journal from the publisher Frontiers)
JURN’s A-Z List of eco/nature journals now lists over 700 titles, open access or otherwise free to the public. That total does not include the additional lists of hybrid OA titles and mapping titles, found at the foot of the main A-Z list.
Small outage on Monday evening
12 Tuesday Apr 2016
Posted in JURN metrics
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.
On the growth rate in OA
12 Tuesday Apr 2016
Posted in JURN metrics, Spotted in the news
Some new figures today on open access growth from the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics blog. Imaginary Journal reports that Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) is now at… “just under 89 million documents”. However a quick filter of BASE, for journal articles in English in OA, shows a figure of only 3.1m. And the vast majority of those are in medicine and science…
It’s interesting to hear that PubMed has recently made… “a transition in indexing practice (from manual to automatic)”. Hopefully that won’t affect the quality of the intake.
The DOAJ reportedly added “540 journals” this last quarter.
JURN isn’t counted by Imaginary Journal’s tally, but I’ve done a quick count via the ‘Added to JURN’ blog posts. JURN added 133 new journal titles (published in English) to the index in the first quarter of 2016. That would probably be more like 200, if the newly added non-English journals were also being counted on the blog.
200 new titles
05 Thursday Nov 2015
Posted in JURN metrics
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.
Some JURN metrics for 2014
07 Wednesday Jan 2015
Posted in JURN metrics
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)
The Number of Scholarly Documents on the Public Web
03 Tuesday Jun 2014
Posted in JURN metrics, Spotted in the news
PLOS ONE: “The Number of Scholarly Documents on the Public Web”
“Our estimates show that at least 114 million English-language scholarly documents are accessible on the web, of which Google Scholar has nearly 100 million. Of these, we estimate that at least 27 million (24%) are freely available since they do not require a subscription or payment of any kind.”
I’d say that 27m is probably a large underestimate, given that the two engines used for the study (Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search) are proven to be poor at indexing open repositories and open access journals. Given a few hours of work I could probably winkle out from JURN a list of 100 “big” URLs, which together would put JURN at 25m (primarily in English) — before even starting to tally all the other URLs.
Group test: “Alan Moore” Watchmen
30 Friday May 2014
Posted in Academic search, JURN metrics
Another group test:
| JURN group test: “Alan Moore” Watchmen May 2014. Searching for free full-text scholarly articles, theses or book chapters in English, with primary discussion of the famous and seminal graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore. Not counting film criticism of the movie version, or book reviews. Clicked through on possible results, and briefly evaluated. |
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| DOAJ | 0 | Used ‘Article’ search. 0 from four results. | |||||||||
| Journal Click | 0 | 0 from zero results. Seems to include a lot of predatory titles and publishers. | |||||||||
| JournalTOCS | 0 | 0 from zero results. | |||||||||
| Ingenta Connect | 0 | 0 from six paywalled results. | |||||||||
| Journal Seek | 0 | 0 from zero results. | |||||||||
| Mendeley | 0 | Searched ‘Articles’ only, then filtered for Open Access articles only — which produced no relevant results. Then removed the OA filter, which gave three relevant results — that were found to be paywalled. | |||||||||
| OAlib | 0 | From 16 results. Had a couple of relevant articles but these were not in English. | |||||||||
| Google Search | 0 | Forced verbatim. Examined first 50 results. As you’d expect, a mess of commercial book listings pages and the occasional pop-cult interview with Moore. The addition of filetype:pdf helped — giving a scattering of student dissertations; the 1st (but not 2nd) edition of the Annotated Watchmen document; and a short undergraduate attempt at a bibliography of scholarly works on Watchmen. | |||||||||
| Microsoft Academic | 1 | One of four results. | |||||||||
| CORE | 2 | Filtered search by English language. CORE offered many incidental or spurious results. | |||||||||
| OATD | 3 | Three from 14 results. | |||||||||
| Digital Commons Network | 3 | Three from 17 results. | |||||||||
| NDLtd | 3 | Three from 12 results. | |||||||||
| Google Scholar | 8 | Examined first 50 results. Google Books links not counted. Five of the good results were from the open journal ImageTexT: interdisciplinary comics studies. Two likely good candidates proved to be “404 Not Found”. | |||||||||
| BASE | 9 | Searched ‘Verbatim’ on ‘Entire Document’. Examined first 50 results. | |||||||||
| OPENDoar | 12 | Examined first 50 results. Two appeared to be basic undergraduate seminar papers. | |||||||||
| JURN | 25 | Checked first 50 results, not counting interviews, book reviews and duplicates. Results remained strong and on-topic right through to result 100. | |||||||||
For JURN, adding an additional search modifier helps to nudge away incidental and duplicate results…
“Alan Moore” intitle:Watchmen
[force intitle:]
“Alan Moore” Watchmen Rorschach
[add focus by adding the name of a key character]
“Alan Moore” Watchmen -site:www.academia.edu
[remove Academia.edu duplicates]
Group test: “Tristram Shandy” reception
27 Sunday Apr 2014
Posted in JURN metrics
Another group test:
| JURN group test: “Tristram Shandy” reception April 2014. Searching for free full-text scholarly articles, theses or book chapters variously related to the reception of the famous and seminal book Tristram Shandy. Clicked through on possible results, and briefly evaluated. |
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| DOAJ | 0 | Used ‘Article’ search. 0 from zero results. | |||||||||
| JournalTOCS | 0 | 0 from zero results. | |||||||||
| Ingenta Connect | 0 | 0 from zero results. | |||||||||
| Journal Seek | 0 | 0 from zero results. | |||||||||
| Mendeley | 0 | Searched ‘Articles’ only, then filtered for Open Access articles only — which produced no relevant results. Then removed the OA filter, which gave one possible result of around 15 — but that proved to be ‘404 not found’. | |||||||||
| OATD | 0 | 0 from zero results. | |||||||||
| OAlib | 0 | OAlib appeared to be nearly totally bamboozled by the inclusion of ‘reception’, only four results of the first 50 being about Tristram Shandy. | |||||||||
| BASE | 1 | Searched ‘Verbatim’ on ‘Entire Document’. Examined first 50 results. | |||||||||
| NDLtd | 1 | 1 of only two results. | |||||||||
| Microsoft Academic | 1 | 1 of only one result. | |||||||||
| CORE | 2 | CORE appeared to be totally bamboozled by the inclusion of ‘reception’, so I tried again with just “Tristram Shandy” + set the filter to just English results. | |||||||||
| OPENDoar | 3 | Examined first 50 results. | |||||||||
| Digital Commons Network | 3 | From 10 results. Only one hit was strongly relevant. | |||||||||
| Google Search | 4 | Using unmodified Internet Explorer 11, not signed in to Google. Forced verbatim. Examined first 50 results. Didn’t count Google Books links. | |||||||||
| Google Scholar | 4 | Examined first 50 results. Google Books links not counted. Faux PDF links for hs3esdk.ru and kmvhr3.biz (dubious-looking Project Muse duplicates in Russia, presumably eager to accept your credit card details!) not counted. | |||||||||
| JURN | 14 | Checked first 50 results, not counting articles or chapters that mention the book title in passing. | |||||||||
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.
JURN’s big expansion and ‘spring cleaning’ is complete
25 Friday Apr 2014
Ok, I’m calling the recent big expansion and ‘spring cleaning’ of JURN complete. If anyone wishes to publicise this fact, perhaps to their newsletter readers or social networks or blogs, here’s some news blurb…
News, 25th April 2014: Jurn.org search-tool expands in scope
The open access search tool Jurn.org has just completed a significant expansion, undertaken throughout March/April 2014. Jurn.org had previously only indexed its core collection of over 4,000 arts and humanities ejournals, all open access or otherwise free. The new Jurn.org expansion has now added a large intake of business and law, science, biomedical and ecology related open access ejournals. Also new to Jurn.org are full-text theses at selected academic repositories, with an initial focus on including the bulk of the larger UK research repositories. Jurn.org has been built by hand, and highly curated, over a period of five years. Jurn is non profit and ad-free.