“Google Scholar is Filled with Junk”… and now, what-claims-to-be porn, even. The aptly-named iPensatori investigates.

I’d noticed this problem starting to creep in as long ago as 2014, by another route, even before Scholar began to be being targeted by SEO spivs. When searches for ‘Lovecraft’ (seeking new scholarship on the 20th century’s greatest horror/sci-fi writer) on Google Scholar started bringing up ebooks of explicit sex-stories listed on Google Books, as well as other more dubious sources. Here’s my screenshot of a Google Books entry in Google Scholar, from 2014…

Many more occurrences since then, too.

My quick tickle of ‘naked’ ‘celebrities’ in JURN suggests there’s no such content to be found via JURN.

Over the last month or so Retraction Watch’s Weekend Reads has become a must-read weekly newsletter. Not just the usual slate of links to stonkingly huge retractions but also tales of academic embezzlement, an article in The Economist on the systemic problems in Chinese science and academic publishing, ghost-management of the entire process of bringing a drug to market, news of quiet Elsevier acquisitions, and how Northwestern Polytechnic University in Silicon Valley became a corrupt test-faking visa-factory. That’s just a small sample from this week’s edition. There’s also optimism-inducing stuff, like this week’s news of Google’s new ‘Science Journal’ phone app which turns your phone into a citizen-science research lab.

Another observation on Facebook’s Group search. Searching a Group’s archives for “winning” shows all posts with “won’t” in them, seemingly on the principle that “won’t” contains “won” in it.

A snapshot of Bing’s recommendation-engine, located at the foot of their Image Search. Still some way to go with the semantics, to crack the pesky ‘pop music band-names’ problem…

Super is the title of the band’s new album, if you were wondering.

SHERPA REF Beta is an open access compliance checking tool.

It seems that some universities are in for a rude awakening as they prepare for the next REF. According to the Wellcome Trust, 54% of Wiley’s hybrid OA articles published in 2014-15… “are non-compliant with terms of grant funding”. Across all publishers, 30% that Wellcome paid to be OA were not made OA in a REF-valid manner.

A quick note on the increasing tendency to wrongly use “Master’s degree”, instead of “Masters degree”, when referring to the Masters degree (the degree of the masters, not the degree of a master). Tonight I spotted “Master’s” occurring throughout the government consultation document on UK postgraduate loans. Open access to old books makes past usage into a sound and easily consulted guide, for those disinclined to open a dictionary. 60 seconds with Google Books, for instance, shows…

” … as in the case of a Masters degree” (Oxford University Calendar, 1850).

“the Masters degree to begin …” (The American Journal of Education, 1873).

A Study of All Masters Degree Graduates of The New York School of Social Work (1954).

Standards for Professional Masters Degree Programs (National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration, 1988).

The Masters Degree by Coursework (Australian Government Public Service, 1995).

Distance Education and the Masters Degree in Canada (University of Alberta, 1998).

One can also refer to a collection of “Masters’ theses” in America, it seems, though here in the UK I’ve only ever known of “Masters’ dissertations”.

The UMass Boston Bookshelf. A set of repository records for their books, as an integral part the main scholarworks.umb.edu repository at the University of Massachusetts Boston. No free PDFs there, but erm… commercial links to Amazon labelled “Buy this Submission”. Is the university that desperate for money, that they need to turn their supposedly open repository into a bookshop?