How to search only RSS feeds in arts & humanities ejournals

26 Thursday Nov 2009

Posted by in Academic search, My general observations

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If you’re interested in discovering RSS feeds from the JURN Directory of ejournal home pages, here’s the recipe:

Make an “instant custom search engine” from the JURN Directory. This is different from the main JURN engine — it’s searching the home pages, not the articles.

Now you can search this on-the-fly engine using this formula:

   inurl:rss OR inurl:feed OR inurl:rdf keyword

You’re now searching only within news feeds, although in practice it’s not actually that useful — because so few open/free ejournals have news feeds.

The other drawback is Google Search’s “hard” limit of 100 results per search query.

Feed me

25 Wednesday Nov 2009

Posted by in How to improve academic search

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The commercial journal publishers provide sound RSS feeds by default, enabling complex services such as Journal TOCs. But there’s a distinct lack of RSS feeds from open access ejournals (even those using dedicated journal software) and other free ejournals. For instance, I did a quick RSS harvest of the Archaeology and Classical Civilisations sections in the JURN Directory, and came up with a pitifully small list of valid feeds…

http://www.ajaonline.org/rss.xml

http://arche.bymedia.net/arche.rss

http://www.archaeology.org/rss.xml

http://intarch.ac.uk/content.rdf

http://www.palarch.nl/feed/

http://www.byzsym.org/index.php/bz/gateway/plugin/WebFeedGatewayPlugin/rss2

http://scholarworks.umass.edu/etruscan_studies/recent.rss

http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~lingaeg/rss/rssfeed.xml

http://nome.unak.is/nome2/feed.xml

http://www.palarch.nl/feed/

http://scholarworks.umass.edu/rasenna/recent.rss

http://pompeiiana.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/classicsjournal/recent.rss

…so it hardly seems worth using something like rFeedfinder to harvest all the auto-discoverable RSS feeds for JURN’s Directory. The lack of feeds would appear to be one of the major failings of the online provision of free scholarly articles.

feed:bing

25 Wednesday Nov 2009

Posted by in How to improve academic search

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Nice. Here’s a useful Bing search modifier that Google doesn’t have…

feed:keyword

…finds only RSS feeds.

In Google you’d have to use this sort of roundabout method…

inurl:rss keyword

inurl:feed keyword

Or chain the two main types together with all the minor possibilities such as rdf…

inurl:rss OR inurl:feed OR inurl:rdf keyword

Google can also do (albiet while triggering annoying ‘are you a robot?’ captchas)…
‘

filetype:rss keyword

… which discovers a lot, but obviously not everything. So then you would need to use filetype:xml — and that would bring in all sorts of things which are not RSS feeds. Chaining inurl: seems the better option.

A simple universal comprehensive blog search, like the old Technorati, would be the better solution. But it seems no-one wants to build one, for some unknown reason.

Journal TOCs

23 Monday Nov 2009

Posted by in Academic search

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The new Journal TOCs search tool allows you to…

“…search the latest Table of Contents (TOCs) of 12,568 journals collected from 422 publishers. More journals are added continuously. You can start by searching for TOCs by journal title or by keywords (searching 336,025 TOC articles). You also can browse TOCs by publisher or by subject. Then, if you click on a journal title, the latest Table of Contents will be displayed.”

Seemingly recently launched without any marketing buzz (not a single blog seems to have linked to it before now), it appears to arise from the “TicTOCs” RSS aggregation service. It’s run by the same people as TicTOCs — Santy Chumbe and Lisa Rogers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. According to the departmental home page, the £200k two-year TicTOCs is now a “past project” and is dated as having completed in 2009.

Testing the new Journal TOCs with a sample of titles listed by the JURN Directory: such as Comitatus; Museum and Society; ImageTexT; Culture Machine, gives no results. This indicates that Journal TOCs is largely indexing commercial titles, presumably via standard RSS feeds. Although free titles from the French revues.org ejournal repository service are included, presumably because standard RSS feeds are to be had.

The old TicTOCs also has search, but its search function is possibly no longer being updated — the database on Journal TOCs appears to be more up-to-date, with my test search bringing results from June 09 which are not to be had from the same search on TicTOCs.