01 Thursday Oct 2015
Posted in Spotted in the news
Internet Monitor Dashboard from Harvard… “explore, create, customize, and share dashboards of data visualizations about multiple facets of the Internet.” Looks like a sort of citizen-accessible global cyber-attack early-warning system, with attacks broadly defined as everything from Wikipedia edits and news reports through to the number and scale of direct network attacks.
28 Monday Sep 2015
Posted in Academic search, JURN's Google watch, Spotted in the news
Interesting new paper at PLOS One, “The Role of Google Scholar in Evidence Reviews and Its Applicability to Grey Literature Searching”.
Test searches were drawn from review papers…
“…chosen as they covered a diverse range of topics in environmental management and conservation, and included interdisciplinary elements relevant to public health, social sciences and molecular biology.”
… and compared alongside Web of Science results…
Surprisingly, we found relatively little overlap between Google Scholar and Web of Science (10–67% of WoS results were returned using searches in Google Scholar using title searches).
Unsurprisingly, Google Scholar wasn’t found to be the one-stop shop many assume it to be…
… some important evidence was not identified at all by Google Scholar … [so it] should not be used as a standalone resource in evidence-gathering exercises such as systematic [literature] reviews.”
Interesting finding also that…
“Peak” grey literature content (i.e. the point at which the volume of grey literature per page of search results was at its highest and where the bulk of grey literature is found) occurred [in Google Scholar] on average at page 80 (±15 (SD)) for full text results … page 35 (± 25 (SD)) for title [search] results.”
So this suggests that one might usefully flick through to result 700 (of 1000) and work a few hundred results starting from there, if seeking grey literature with a very well-formed topic search? By well-formed I mean the sort of sophisticated literature-review style of search term chaining being used in this study, for example…
“oil palm” AND tropic* AND (diversity OR richness OR abundance OR similarity OR composition OR community OR deforestation OR “land use change” OR fragmentation OR “habitat loss” OR connectivity OR “functional diversity” OR ecosystem OR displacement)
It appears that the researchers only auto-extracted “citation records” from the search results, and then classified into broad categories based on those alone. There appears to have been no checking as to the validity of the link, and/or downloading and scrutiny of PDFs. So there are no measurements of how many of Google Scholar’s links work or lead to free no-paywall fulltext articles.
Lastly, I noted…
Google Scholar has a low threshold for repetitive activity that triggers an automated block to a user’s IP address (in our experience the export of approximately 180 citations or 180 individual searches). Thankfully this can be readily circumvented with the use of IP-mirroring software such as Hola (https://hola.org/)”
25 Friday Sep 2015
Posted in My general observations, Spotted in the news
Has it leaked? is a rather nice specialist search tool for free content, from Sweden. Focussed on forthcoming arty music albums, it basically saves fans the task of tracking down the tracks / snippets / “making of…” etc that the official marketeers ‘leak’ for free in advance of the album, or during the release window. It’s not a pirate site, though, and firmly states: “No download links are allowed!”.
I’d say there’s room in the market for something similar for all quality non-fiction books, perhaps in partnership with a book-summary service like Blinklist, and with user-configurable topic filters.
Why would such a site be needed? Here’s an instance of the limited way in which current mega-services offer to group versions or offer preview options. If one looks at Amazon UK for the new Matt Ridley book The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge one only sees two options there for the audiobook: free with an Audible direct-debit subscription, or a £30 pre-order and wait until November for delivery. Even then the audiobook pages are not linked from the print book page, so someone landing on the print page via Web search would have no clue there even was an audiobook version. No mention at all on Amazon UK that it’s actually available now for £13 on the Audible UK site, or that there’s a free 13 minute extract of the introduction of the audiobook available via publisher on SoundCloud. Only my deep searching surfaced the free audiobook extract.
The above suggests that two mega-services (Amazon and Audible) and a mega-publisher (Harper) can’t even co-ordinate promo material and version offers for a major book in the globally important UK market. So I’d say there’s a lot of scope for savvy curators to do it for them, also adding author podcast links, newspaper book review links etc.
23 Wednesday Sep 2015
Posted in Spotted in the news
The Adblock Browser has launched for mobile devices (Android and iOS). DuckDuckGo is their default search-engine.
22 Tuesday Sep 2015
Posted in JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news
This may possibly be handy for some people. How to remove your fulltext PDF from ResearchGate, but leave the record standing. Finding the way to the delete function doesn’t seem very intuitive…
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TqBusqz1nY?rel=0&w=420&h=315]
20 Sunday Sep 2015
Posted in Spotted in the news
A fine short blog post by Manu Saunders on the historical ecology data latent in art history.
Picture: 1857 bushfire near Timboon, Victoria, Australia.
20 Sunday Sep 2015
Posted in Spotted in the news
Tree of Life, a rough first-try at merging the available data on the relationships of the 2.3 million known and named species on Earth…
“According to a survey of more than 7,500 phylogenetic research papers published between 2000 and 2012, only one out of six studies came with a digital, downloadable format of the data. … Many of the evolutionary trees that have been published are only available as PDFs and other image files that can’t be entered into a database or merged with other trees.”
19 Saturday Sep 2015
Posted in Spotted in the news
Have you noticed the rise of UTM tracking tokens in URLs? There’s an increasing amount of extra text being added after the URL, usually meant to tell marketeers how the link was found. At its simplest it might look something like…
http://www.url.org/page.html?#they_found_this__page_via_Facebook
Anyone not web-savvy who then shares the URL also unwittingly reveals to the world how they found that URL, unless the tracking is cloaked as gibberish numbers.
Anyway, urlHosted has spotted the potential of this URL misusage to initiate a new server-less communication method…
urlHosted is an experimental web app that misuses the part after the “#” of a URL to store and read data. … This means this app neither stores nor sends any of your data to any server. … [then] Whenever you visit the site [that has] payload data in the URL, the [URLhosted browser] app renders that data as an [text] article.”
One would still have to pass a clickable link somehow, so I’m not sure how useful this would actually be to anyone in its current form. I guess at its most clandestine urlHosted might work something like: Bill places a time-limited message-URL in an old post on his blog, then casually refers to the title of this post (without linking to it, or even mentioning his blog) in an email to Susan. Bill and Susan both know that this mention means she should check his blog and find the post in the next 12 hours — and then click on an URL there that has been temporarily altered to contain a message. urlHosted elegantly renders the message on a page for Susan. 12 hours later Bill switches the URL link back to normal. Since old blog posts are only rarely re-indexed by search services, and receive little traffic, there’s only a slim chance the message will be exposed to public view. The addition of simple ROT-13 to the message would make it even more unlikely to be discovered. But it’s probably much easier for Bill and Susan just to use SnapChat.
Update: There’s a handy Greasemonkey script for Firefox users that simply auto-strips such gunk from the URL when the Web page loads in the browser. Those in need of a standalone add-on for Firefox might look at Au Revoir ATM or PureURL.
19 Saturday Sep 2015
Posted in Spotted in the news
A 2015 study of the “Indexing of Mapping Science Journals”, including cartographic history journals.
* Found that 47 such titles were published as free / open access, but that only eight of those were in the DOAJ.
* Of the 47 free / open access titles, 12 were represented in Google Scholar by 10 or less articles.
* Scopus indexed 18 of the 47 free / open access titles.
18 Friday Sep 2015
Posted in Spotted in the news
So it’s “back to school” time. What fab free MOOCs are available and starting this September / October?
* Teaching Library Research Strategies | Canvas Network
“… an experienced academic librarian will share his strategies for getting students engaged in the art of library research.”
* Book Sleuthing: What 19th-Century Books Can Tell Us About the Rise of the Reading Public | edX
“Go behind the scenes at Harvard’s libraries to discover how readers in the first information age interacted with their books.”
* 30 Days of TED | Canvas Network
“… the wide variety of resources available on the TED website [TED Talks etc] and how to use them in the classroom.”