04 Tuesday Aug 2015
Posted in Spotted in the news
Retraction Watch has been given a $400,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, “to create a comprehensive database of retractions, allowing us to hire our first staff writer”.
Depending on the form it takes this could potentially be indexed by JURN? It would have to be one retraction, one page, and have the OA status indicated in the URL path — www.database.fuz/articles/oa/article725.html
30 Thursday Jul 2015
Posted in My general observations
I’m pleased to say that JURN’s annual summer repair-and-update process is now complete. All that remains is for me to roll out some donation-ware goodies in the next week or so, and add 40 or so URLs for additional journals over the coming weeks.
29 Wednesday Jul 2015
Posted in Academic search, JURN's Google watch
A new blog post from Aaron Tay, “5 things Google Scholar does better than your library discovery service”, looking at the huge market advantages enjoyed by Google Scholar. The main points in summary:
* Intake and update: Google intakes, refreshes and updates very quickly.
* Automated detection: The Google bot spots and indexes academic articles wherever those are located.
* Relevancy ranking: It’s certainly not perfect, but is vastly better than anyone else’s.
* Clear and fast: Simple interface, a few useful widgets and filters. Additional features are accessed only via typed-in search modifiers or the well-hidden “Advanced” form.
* Cross-platform: Scholar can be tweaked to become a seamless gateway into paid subscription services.
I would also add…
* De-duplication in results. Not always perfect, not always even seen by the end user, but pretty intelligent.
27 Monday Jul 2015
Posted in Ecology additions, My general observations
Here’s another quick group test of academic search tools that index open access or otherwise free academic papers. It follows JURN’s recent large number of additions of ecology related sources. The test search is on the popular topic of “mountain gorillas”, with a tourism keyword that is intended to skew results toward papers and chapters useful for understanding the inter-relationship of gorillas with tourism. Not a very sophisticated search, but the sort of thing that an age 16-18 college student or undergraduate might input.
Search: “mountain gorillas” tourism
| JURN group test: “mountain gorillas” tourism July 2015. Searching for free full-text academic articles, theses, reports or book chapters in English. I clicked through on possible results and evaluated. |
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| Journal Click | ? | Now requires registration / payment to use, and the public search box has been removed. Thus it was not tested. It performed very poorly in previous tests. | |||||||||
| DOAJ | 0 | Used ‘Article’ search. Zero from one result. | |||||||||
| JournalTOCS | 0 | Zero from one result. | |||||||||
| Paperity | 0 | Checked first 25 results. Closest possibility seemed to be the general short survey article “Exploring Sustainable Tourism in Nigeria for Developmental Growth”, but on investigation the text had no mention of gorillas. | |||||||||
| Journal Seek | 0 | Zero results. | |||||||||
| PQDT Open | 0 | Zero from five results. | |||||||||
| Ingenta Connect | 0 | Zero from three results | |||||||||
| CORE | 0 | Filtered search by English language, full-text only. Looked at first three pages of results. Results were a disparate jumble of general tourism items, though CORE did manage to bring the political anthropology dissertation “Lines in the sand: An anthropological discourse on wildlife tourism” to the top, but this was only tangentially relevant. | |||||||||
| Microsoft Academic | 1 | 1 from eight results. “Measuring the demand for nature-based tourism in Africa”, a UK economics experiment asking potential tourists about their likely choices around a hypothetical visit to see the mountain gorillas in Rwanda. | |||||||||
| OATD | 1 | 1 from two results. 2014 PhD thesis, asking if tourism reduces poverty-related forest mis-use by local people, in the Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda, a key mountain gorillas tourism destination. | |||||||||
| OAlib | 1 | OAlib gave a jumble of general results for tourism in mountains, but had nothing specific on the first page for either Africa or gorillas. Second page had the 2011 article “Extreme Conservation Leads to Recovery of the Virunga Mountain Gorillas” at PLOS One, among another jumble of irrelevant results. | |||||||||
| Google Search | 1 | Used a Web browser not signed in to Google, forced Google.com results (not .uk). Newspapers (Guardian, Daily Mail, CNN, FT etc) and magazine (National Geographic) articles, amid charity and tourist holiday booking sites. Got one good result, the World Bank’s report “The success of tourism in Rwanda – Gorillas and more”, as result No.15. Checked the first thirty results. A short interview by the Breakthrough Institute, “Extreme Conservation of Gorillas”, was judged too journalistic and tangential to be a result. | |||||||||
| OpenAIRE | 1 | The one likely candidate, 2001’s “Ecological and economic impacts of gorilla-based tourism in Dzanga-Sangha, Central African Republic”, proved to have no full text available. But trying a different search access point into OpenAIRE surfaced one useful item, “Habituation, ecotourism and research for conservation of western gorillas in Central African Republic”. | |||||||||
| Mendeley | 2 | Searched ‘Articles’ only, then filtered for Open Access articles only. After the first ten results, results dissipated into general/unrelated tourism items. One useful result provided some deep historical background to the current tourism: “Memories of Walter Baumgartel (1902-1997): pioneering promoter of the mountain gorillas of Uganda”. Another was more about the general conservation measures, but useful, “Extreme conservation leads to recovery of the Virunga mountain gorillas”. | |||||||||
| Digital Commons Network (BePress) | 2 | I switched out of the Arts and Humanities section for this search. I had 17 results, two of them strong, with another three being very broad critical studies of aspects of eco-tourism aesthetics. | |||||||||
| FreeFullPDF | 5 | From 26 results. Three tourism items (“Measuring the demand for nature-based tourism in Africa” in which gorillas was used as test topic; “The success of tourism in Rwanda – Gorillas and more”; “Development AND gorillas? Assessing fifteen years of integrated conservation and development in south-western Uganda”; and “Memories of Walter Baumgartel (1902-1997)”. Plus two partially relevant items on general conservation (“Extreme Conservation Leads to Recovery of the Virunga Mountain Gorillas”; and “Sustainable Conservation of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park and community welfare improvement”). | |||||||||
| BASE | 5 | I chose the facet to “boost open access documents”. 24 results, with many duplicates. Some possible results turned out to lack full-text. One promising article, “Benefits to the poor from gorilla tourism in Rwanda”, proved to be paywalled at $76(!). | |||||||||
| Google Scholar | 6 | Checked first 40 results. Results tended to focus strongly on gorilla disease, diet, mating and population dynamics. But among these were three full-text open papers on ape tourism and disease transfer to/from them, which had not been surfaced in the test before (“Habituating the great apes: the disease risks”; “Ape tourism and human diseases: how close should we get”; “Anthropozoonotic … infections in habitats of free-ranging human-habituated gorillas, Uganda”). Plus another three, including a pirate copy of “Who is on the gorilla’s payroll? Claims on tourist revenue from a Ugandan National Park”, and the World Bank report “The success of tourism in Rwanda: Gorillas and more”, plus the ubiquitous PLOS One article “Extreme conservation leads to recovery of the Virunga mountain gorillas”. Many of the full-text links offered at Scholar came via researchgate.net. | |||||||||
| OPENDoar | 10 | Examined first 40 results. The World Bank report “The success of tourism in Rwanda: Gorillas and more” was at No.4, followed by the ubiquitous PLOS One article “Extreme conservation leads to recovery of the Virunga mountain gorillas”. Some duplicates. One prospective item (“Evaluating the prospects of benefit sharing schemes in protecting mountain gorillas in Central Africa”) led to a $38 paywall whereas JURN found it free, while others (“The role of tourism in post-conflict peacebuilding in Rwanda”) led to records that had no full-text. Most useful was the indexing of the German-run on-the-ground Gorilla Journal, offering articles such as community opinion research among local people, “Gorilla Habituation and Ecotourism – a Social Perspective” (June 2014); “Western Gorilla Tourism: Lessons Learned from Dzanga-Sangha” (Dec 2006); and “Ten Years of Gorilla Tourism in Mgahinga” (June 2004). However, these three article titles were not highlighted in search and were instead deeply embedded in single issue PDFs of Gorilla Journal. (I regret that Gorilla Journal is not yet indexed in JURN, but it will be added soon). | |||||||||
| JURN | 15 | Looked at first 40 results, the link titles of which are given below. There were a number of duplicates in the first four pages. A key finding is that JURN is now large enough to easily provide strong results through to result No.100. So, given a well-formed search, people who are habituated to just look at the first ten results in Google should explore the full set of 100 results in JURN. | |||||||||
JURN results:
1. * “The success of tourism in Rwanda – Gorillas and more”.
2. “Extreme Conservation of Gorillas”.
3. * “Evaluating the Prospects of Benefit Sharing Schemes in Protecting Mountain Gorillas in Central Africa”.
4. “Human Metapneumovirus Infection in Wild Mountain Gorillas, Rwanda”.
5. “The Success of Tourism in Rwanda: Gorillas and More” (duplicate of No.1).
6. “Conserving critically endangered central African Mountain Gorillas from poaching threats”.
7. * APE TOURISM AND HUMAN DISEASES: How Close Should We Get?
8. “Dian Fossey’s Controversial “Active Conservation” Proves Useful in Increasing Mountain Gorilla Awareness”.
9. * Best Practice Guidelines for Great Ape Tourism (78 page book from the IUCN)
10. “Diversity of Microsporidia, Cryptosporidium and Giardia in Mountain Gorillas”.
11. “(Gorilla beringei beringei) in Bwindi Impenetrable” (mis-titled in results link, actually has main title “Landscape predictors of current and future distribution of mountain gorillas”)
12. * “Economics of Gorilla Tourism in Uganda”.
13. * “Extreme Conservation Leads to Recovery of the Virunga Mountain Gorillas”.
14. “Genetic census reveals increased but uneven growth of a critically endangered mountain gorilla population”.
15. “Murdered: the Virunga Gorillas” (National Geographic article from 2008, on pressures from militias, refugees and charcoal burners).
16. “Mountain Gorillas: Three Decades of Research at Karisoke”.
17. “Cambridge Books Online” (Free book chapter from Cambridge University Press, “Long-term research and conservation of the Virunga mountain gorillas”, from the book Science and Conservation in African Forests).
18. “The Success of Tourism in Rwanda: Gorillas and More” (another duplicate of No.1).
19. “Impacts of tourism and recreation in Africa” (Encyclopedia of Earth, short introductory article by the U.N.).
20. * “Gorilla-based Tourism: a Realistic Source of Community Income in Cameroon? Case study of the villages of Goungoulou and Karagoua”.
21. “Gentle Gorillas, Turbulent Times” (National Geographic article from 1995).
22. “Mountain Gorilla PHVA Final Report 1997”.
23. “Consequences of Non-Intervention for Infectious Disease in African Great Apes”.
24. * “VIRUNGA MASSIF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM DEVELOPMENT PLAN”. (2005. A useful baseline for understanding what was expected of the gorilla tourism in Rwanda).
25. * “Chimpanzee Tourism in Mahale Mountains National Park, Tanzania”. (Not gorillas, but included because possibly useful for comparison).
26. * “THE RWANDAN GORILLA PROJECT” (Detailed charity prospectus proposal to UK investors, for a gorilla tourism venture. Another useful baseline for understanding what was expected of the gorilla tourism in Rwanda, from the investor point of view).
27. * “Development AND gorillas? Assessing fifteen years of integrated conservation and development in south-western Uganda”.
28. “Population dynamics of the Bwindi mountain gorillas”.
29. * “Evaluating the prospects of benefit sharing schemes in protecting mountain gorillas in Central Africa”. (Free full-text at JURN, but behind a $38 paywall at OPENDoar — see the OPENDoar entry given above).
30. “Dian Fossey’s Controversial “Active Conservation” Proves Useful in Increasing Mountain Gorilla Awareness” (Duplicate of No.8).
31. * “THE ECONOMIC VALUE OF THE MOUNTAIN GORILLA PROTECTED FORESTS (The Virungas and Bwindi Impenetrable National Park). Final Report”. (Has 12 pages of rigourous examination of the value of gorilla tourism).
32. “Evaluating the prospects of benefit sharing schemes in protecting mountain gorillas in Central Africa”. (Duplicate).
33. * “From vision to narrative: A trial of information-based gorilla tourism in the Moukalaba-Doudou National Park, Gabon”.
34. “From vision to narrative: A trial of information-based gorilla tourism in the Moukalaba-Doudou National Park, Gabon”. (Duplicate of No.33).
35. Diversity of Microsporidia, Cryptosporidium and Giardia in Mountain … (Duplicate of No.10)
36. * “Gorilla Tourism: Uganda uses tourism to recover from decades of violent conflict”.
37. “Plumptre et al 2003 Current status of gorillas” (Cambridge University free book chapter, “The current status of gorillas and threats to their existence at the beginning of a new millennium”)
38. “Community-based forest enterprise development for improved livelihoods and biodiversity conservation: a case study from Bwindi World Heritage site, Uganda” (Short, and rather too tangential, but useful in showing the gorilla tourism in the context of other micro-livelihoods such as honey, oyster mushrooms, handicrafts, growing passion fruits and Irish potatoes).
39. “Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda” (Encyclopedia of Earth, short introductory article by the U.N.).
40. “20 Years of IGCP: Lessons Learned in Mountain Gorilla Conservation”.
Results stayed on-topic for mountain gorillas and/or related tourism right through to result No.100, with another 10 or so results that would have been very useful — but which were not counted for the purposes of this test.
27 Monday Jul 2015
I’ve now completed JURN’s painstaking annual summer check-and-repair, by checking each and every indexed URL to see if it is still present in the main Google Search results. Both JURN search and the JURN Directory are now as up-to-date and link-rot free as they can be.
27 Monday Jul 2015
Posted in New titles added to JURN
I’m pleased to say that JURN is now nearer to becoming a useful search tool for open access journal articles in the geosciences. JURN already had moderately good coverage of this science, but after discovering the American Geosciences Institute’s handy directory of Open Access Journals in geosciences I have been able to index a further 30 geoscience journals. I’ve also started to add a list of around 40 further journals that were previously missing from JURN — most of the remaining missing journals are from small nations such as Portugal, Finland, Belgium, Hungary, etc, and these will be added before the end of 2015. In using AGI to compile a list of the missing geoscience journals I’ve taken care to consider only journals from reputable publishers (the AGI’s directory appears to have an open policy of listing all applicants).
23 Thursday Jul 2015
Posted in JURN tips and tricks, JURN's Google watch
Changes at Google Search have broken GoogleMonkeyR in Firefox. Working fix here.
This GoogleMonkeyR fix will break an old version of Google Hit Hider By Domain, but upgrading Hit Hider to the latest 1.6.6 version will fix that too. Install 1.6.6, copy the blocklist from the old 1.6.x, import it over into 1.6.6 then disable 1.6.
The result is perfect for desktop-based ‘power searchers’ — an elegant no-scrolling at-a-glance display of Google Search results, suitable for a widescreen PC monitor and with unwanted results/domains hidden.
19 Sunday Jul 2015
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
“The Microsoft Academic Graph is a heterogeneous graph containing scientific publication records, citation relationships between those publications, as well as authors, institutions, journals and conference “venues” and fields of study. This data is available as a set of zipped text files … The file size is ~37GB.”
13 Monday Jul 2015
Posted in My general observations
I’ve enabled Speech Input for the JURN search box. So far as I can tell this doesn’t impact the speed or overall search experience. But the new feature may be useful for those using certain smartphones or text-to-speech software on a desktop PC.
I’ve also experimentally enabled the “Image” search tab, which now sits alongside a tab for “Web” search results. The “Image” results are drawn from the same set of URLs as the main search. Due to JURN’s large size the “Image” results may take a second or so to appear. This doesn’t appear to impact the speed of the main “Web” search results, since “Image” results are not loaded simultaneously.
“Image” results only start to become usefully focussed when using phrases such as [“banana cultivation” spacing]. Those who just use a short string of keywords, such as [banana cultivation spacing], will often see what initially looks like it might be a useful selection. But on closer investigation these results can be somewhat off-topic, for instance line drawings showing how to plant cocoa and mango plants as well as bananas. As with the main search, to get the best out of JURN’s new “Image search” it’s best to uses phrases with additional keywords, and to be as specific in your keyword choice as possible.
12 Sunday Jul 2015
Posted in My general observations
The EU’s ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling is now censoring academic books on Google Books…
