New on Google Scholar, search within all the papers that cite the one you’re interested in.
InCite
07 Wednesday Jul 2010
Category Archives: Spotted in the news
Arts and humanities impacts
11 Friday Jun 2010
A new report, Assessing the impact of arts and humanities research at the University of Cambridge makes a rare stab at trying to develop a framework for the wider impact of arts & humanities research.
A newbie in the archives
10 Thursday Jun 2010
Posted in Spotted in the news
“you could install an architecture blogger — or a film blogger, a food blogger, an archaeology blogger, a fiction blogger — in an overlooked archive somewhere, anywhere in the world, and thus help to reveal those items to the general public?”
Findability and wastage
08 Tuesday Jun 2010
A new Network World article on findability. Professionals, it is said,…
“spend 20% of their time looking for information and they find what they are looking for less than half of the time. That’s equivalent to spending 10 weeks a year searching for information and remaining ignorant half of that time.”
And that’s presumably with the expensive knowledge management tools ordered by the consultants.
Bypassing Australian net censorship
21 Friday May 2010
How to bypass the Great Censorship Wall of Australia…
“The brief? To teach your grandma to bypass the Internet filter.”
Optimising scholarly papers for Google Scholar
30 Saturday Jan 2010
Posted in Academic search, JURN's Google watch, Spotted in the news
Oh dear, now arriving in academia — the dubious ‘art’ of optimising texts to temporarily rank highly in search-engines. Testament to the power of Google, I suppose. Optimizing Scholarly Literature for Google Scholar & Co. (PDF link).
“Ah paper, I remember paper…”
26 Tuesday Jan 2010
An interesting report from official UK government researchers YouGov, The Costs of Traditional Filing (PDF link). Small and medium businesses in the UK together…
“waste an estimated £42 million each day locating paper documents. … [staff in an average firm] spend approx. 3 months a year looking for documents […] 87% of respondents spend up to 2 hours every day looking for documents”
Add to that the time untrained staff waste looking for things online, and there’s some serious business wastage going on. And I’d suspect that matters are the same in much of the public sector.
Fake China
16 Saturday Jan 2010
Posted in Ooops!, Spotted in the news
I suppose a further question is, does it extend beyond the sciences…?
“The latest in a string of high-profile academic fraud cases in China […] Several sources revealed to Nature that roughly one-third of more than 6000 scientists surveyed across six top institutions admitted to plagiarism, falsification, or fabrication.”
It seems it’s probably just as well that no independent open-access ejournals are allowed in mainland China, since otherwise they would have been easily available to researchers in the West.
On the Edge
09 Saturday Jan 2010
Posted in Spotted in the news
Robert Shapiro at the Edge 2010 Question…
“One survey found that 12% of the Internet addresses cited in three prestigious medical and scientific journals were extinct two years after publication.”
Folksemantic
07 Thursday Jan 2010
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
Nice — a new search-tool for open courseware called Folksemantic. It seems an awkward name, and the closed presentation of results is also rather awkward (no direct URLs, framing of linked pages). But it’s a useful discovery tool, and will certainly go in the JURN guide.
There’s also no option to “never show me any of the 15,767,677,465 U.S. High School lesson-plans”, although there is a “show only courses” filter. Which then seems to leave you entirely with results from OU OpenLearn and MIT’s OCW, at present. But Folksemantic has funding from the National Science Foundation and the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, so it seems set to add new features in future.