29 Wednesday Jul 2009
If you couldn’t be at the recent Research Information Network meeting in London, “The e-journals revolution: how the use of scholarly journals is shaping research”, then RIN has kindly provided a 28 minute “edited highlights” podcast for free.
A delicious little snippet…
“Government researchers search the least. They switch off at Friday lunchtime and don’t come back until Monday lunchtime”
28 Tuesday Jul 2009
Microsoft turns search into a game called Page Hunt. All in the name of science, of course. Page Hunt ask players to ensures a certain page lands in the top five results…
“the game presents players with web pages and asks them to guess the queries that would produce the page within its first five results. Players score 100 points if the page is no.1 on the list, 90 points if it’s no.2, and so on. Bonuses are also awarded for avoiding frequently-used queries.”
Not quite as gripping as the sublime Plants vs. Zombies, but it has some rough-edged charm. And there’s one curious finding already:
“…the longer a page’s URL (in characters), the harder it was for users to match the page to query words. The research doesn’t speculate about why this should be, but here’s a graph showing the relationship between URL length and the ‘findability’ of a page.”
Perhaps there’s a lesson here for those who use ridiculously long and impenetrable scripted URLs?
26 Sunday Jul 2009
Fancy having a 720-page table that lists all humanities journals in the two major commercial subscription databases, and tells you which journal is to be found in which database?…
The June 2009 “A Comparative International Study of Scientific Journal Databases in the Social Sciences and the Humanities” (PDF link, 2.8Mb) by Michele Dassa and Christine Kosmopoulos is just that. Amazingly, it seems to be the first time such a table has been compiled…
“Presented here for the first time in a comparative table are the contents of the databases … in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, of the Web of Science (published by Thomson Reuters) and of Scopus (published by Elsevier), as well as of the biographical lists European Reference Index for Humanities (ERIH) … and of the French Agence d’Evaluation de la Recherche et de l’Enseignement Superieur (AERES). With some 20,000 entries, this is an almost exhaustive overview of the wealth of publications in the Social Sciences and the Humanities …”
This might be read in combination with a May 2009 Gale Reference Review review of three major academic search-engines, which took a sceptical look at both Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus…
“I looked at the widely touted figures in the promotional materials [ of WoS and Scopus and found ] they should not be taken for granted. Many of these are incorrect and exaggerated. Their compilation has been fast and loose, sometimes making them fiction rather than fact.”
“The coverage of arts & humanities [ in Scopus ] is extremely poor (representing barely 1% of the database) [ and by comparison ] Web of Science has about […] 10 times as many for arts & humanities.” [ and even if Scopus gets a boost, as proposed, it would still only have ] about 1/6th of what Web of Science has for these disciplines”
“It is one thing that Scopus has no cited references in records for papers published before 1996, but it adds insult to injury that the pre-1996 papers are ignored. This results in absurdly low h-index for many of the senior teaching and research faculty members and independent researchers who published papers well before 1996 which have been widely cited in the past 25-35 years […] Lazy administrators and bureaucrats stop here and ignore [ worthy people ] for some lifetime award”
21 Tuesday Jul 2009
Posted in Economics of Open Access, Spotted in the news
“Does e-Journal Investment Lead To Greater Academic Productivity?” is a question asked in an article in the July-August 2009 edition of Library and Information Update (p.45)…
This U.K. magazine is not freely available online, but some of the points are usefully summarised over at the OUL Library blog, including, among others…
* Oct-Nov is the busiest season for downloads (a surprise)
* Access in increasingly via third parties (e.g. Google Scholar)
* Historians are the biggest users of Google as access route (?!)
20 Monday Jul 2009
This seems to be an important bit of research. The U.S. Chronicle of Higher Education reports on new NHA research which finds that…
“It costs more than three times as much to publish an article in a humanities or social-science journal as it does to publish one in a science, technical, or medical, or STM, journal [ reports ] an in-depth study of eight flagship journals in the humanities and social sciences.” […] “It cost an average of $9,994 in 2007 to publish an article in one of the eight journals analyzed” […] first-copy costs — “collecting, reviewing, editing, and developing content” — added up to about 47 per cent of the total outlay among the eight journals studied
The National Humanities Alliance report The Future of Scholarly Journals Publishing Among Social Science and Humanities Associations (not yet online) was written during 2007-2009, and examined U.S. data from 2005 to 2007. The Chronicle journalist highlights three possible reasons for the difference…
* articles are significantly longer than in the sciences
* acceptance rates are far lower than in the sciences, at a pitiful 11%
* such journals include a wider variety of content than in the sciences…
“peer-reviewed research made up about 62 percent of what the eight journals published in 2007. The remaining 38 percent consisted of “other scholarly content,” including book reviews.” […] Such material does not come cheap, though; it must still be commissioned, edited, and put into production. It cost an [annual] average of $313,612 per journal in 2007, the study found.
On the “articles are longer” argument, I’m not sure that a simple word-count is a valid measure. Science articles are full of complex tables, formulae, diagrams, and it must take quite some time for a reviewer to mull these over. Similarly, I’m thinking that the acceptance rate may be so low because only the “top eight” most prestigious journals were surveyed — lesser journals may well have a far higher acceptance rate?
20 Monday Jul 2009
Just published by MIT, and available free online, The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.
20 Monday Jul 2009
Posted in Spotted in the news
Harvard University Press has uploaded 1000 books to Scribd. However, it seems that large chunks have been lopped out of the books…
Very similar to Google Books, and I suspect they may even be the same edited files.
20 Monday Jul 2009
A new April 2009 report from Arts Council England, “examining current public attitudes to and experience of arts content online”. It’s just been published on their website. Arts Council reports often need to be taken with a pinch of salt but, surveying just 132 people in the U.K., it found that…
“Creating and participating in the arts digitally is considered a very niche activity by all segments, appealing only to the most ardent ‘leading edge’ enthusiasts. There is little expressed desire for these kinds of opportunities among participants, suggesting that the much discussed ‘co-creating’ and ‘remixing’ generation is still only a small minority.”
[people] “find the extent and variety of art that is available in the digital space overwhelming and intimidating. […] only those who are currently engaged with the arts are likely to explore [future digital] opportunities.”
Related on the JURN blog: Validating interactive new media as a research output and The audience for quality intellectual content is constantly shrinking.
Why is this important? If the public, the funders, and even our fellow academics all make a collective mehh, whatever! in the face of rich interactive arts-related intellectual production, then the resultant mood risks adding to the ongoing undermining of the humanities — since it effectively shuts us off from one possible method to refresh and reinvigorate the humanities. A method that might have served to generate public support for spending scarce public cash on arts-related intellectual production.
18 Saturday Jul 2009
Posted in Spotted in the news
The U.S. National Summit on Arts Journalism is calling for entrepreneurial ideas on how to revive arts journalism, as dedicated newspaper art critics go the way of the dodo. The conference will be held in Los Angeles, sponsored by USC Annenberg School for Communication and the National Arts Journalism Program, and it will be webcast worldwide on 2nd October 09.
“There are many ideas currently buzzing for attention. Our intention here is to try to identify some of the most promising and give them wider circulation. […] We’re looking for sustainable new models […] These can be established projects or startups, but must already be launched or on a clear trajectory to launching. Size of the project is not necessarily a factor, but impact is.”
Projects can be submitted online and will be public, and they’re not looking for blogs or other media made viable only by unpaid work. Five will be picked to receive $2,000 expenses to attend the conference, and (potentially) one of the three cash prizes ($7,500 / $5,000 / $2,500). Sadly, only projects in Canada or the USA are eligible for entry.
15 Wednesday Jul 2009
I can’t remember the last time I saw a new search-engine that more than mildly impressed me (*), but the just-launched Spezify is impressive and different. It’s primarily a visual search-engine aimed at designers and creatives, but also slips in relevant text and audio links. I gave it a tough one: Mongolian folk song, and it delivered very well…
Yes, those are the results! And, as I know this search inside-out, I’d say they’re a reasonably strong and relevant set of results. It seems to be aggregating Yahoo / Bing / YouTube, maybe even Google, but it’s refreshing to see the way the results are mixed and presented. I can see my Visual Communications and Fine Arts students flocking to this.
Sadly, there’s no Firefox search-box addon yet.
* (Actually it was probably We feel fine)