The perils of long article titles

23 Tuesday Jun 2009

Posted by in Academic search, JURN tips and tricks, JURN's Google watch

≈ 2 Comments

Here’s a useful tip: Google’s intitle: search modifier only works if the search-results title/link uses the phrase. It seems that Google is not reading the article title from your metadata, but instead reading it from the links on a larger ‘upstream’ set of search results pages. For instance, searching for intitle:”The Searchers” Ford will not pick up…

   “Home on the Range: Space, Nation, and Mobility in John Ford’s The Searchers“
   from The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13 (2002)

…because the article appears in search results as…

goog-title

As you can see, “The Searchers” has dropped off the end of the link to be replaced with three dots. So using intitle: doesn’t find it.

Article titles should be around 50 characters or less (inc. spaces), to fit comfortably on a Google link. Or a 500-pixel width blog column, for that matter.

Google Scholar is more forgiving, only hitting the same problem at around 100 characters. But JURN works like the main Google, and so users should be aware of the difference.

Left to my own devices

23 Tuesday Jun 2009

Posted by in Official and think-tank reports

≈ Leave a comment

A short new report M-Libraries: information use on the move (PDF link, 1.2Mb) on mobile-phone use and university libraries. It places a question-mark over the popular idea that there’s a tech-savvy ‘Twitter generation’ of undergraduates out there, clamouring for mobile access to the latest edition of Journal of Proctology as they skateboard down the corridors.

Library users at the University of Cambridge and the Open University, both in the UK, were surveyed via a short online survey (a total of 2306 respondents). Despite it being an online survey at two very strong universities — and therefore presumably attracting more tech-savvy students than otherwise — there are some discouraging results for the academic use of mobile devices.

The number of student who say they “never read an e-book” or “never read a journal article” on their mobile are very high (between 86%-94%). From this survey the report concludes that, even if funding permitted, it is…

“not worth libraries putting development resource into delivering content such as eBooks and ejournals to mobile devices at present.”

A review of three major academic search-engines

22 Monday Jun 2009

Posted by in Academic search, JURN's Google watch

≈ Leave a comment

Following my own group-test, it’s interesting to see that Peter at Gale Reference Review has just published a detailed May 2009 review of three major academic search-engines. He takes a skeptical look at Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and Google Scholar. The article is rather long, but here are some interesting quotes…

“Google Scholar […] reports implausibly high citedness counts for most items, which becomes quite obvious when tracing the purportedly citing papers”

“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”

The End of Institutional Repositories

21 Sunday Jun 2009

Posted by in Economics of Open Access

≈ Leave a comment

The End of Institutional Repositories & the Beginning of Social Academic Research Service (16th June 2009)…

“Is it not possible for IRs [ repositories ] to serve as full-fledged electronic libraries and thereby serve the greater purpose of collecting, disseminating, analyzing and exchanging useful digital information for academic purposes? Should not the IR be coupled with the full range of academic and research support services that new technologies permit? […] The challenge, as I see it, is to keep librarians from undermining themselves. […] IRs can be utilized in far more creative ways to enhance the research endeavor.”

Although one might compare such aspirations with the view from the trenches, as expressed in Innkeeper at the Roach Motel…

“Academic librarianship has not supported repositories or their managers. Most libraries consistently under-resource and understaff repositories, further worsening the participation gap. Software and services have been wildly out of touch with faculty needs and the realities of repository management.”

OutWit Docs

20 Saturday Jun 2009

Posted by in Academic search, How to improve academic search, JURN tips and tricks

≈ Leave a comment

Have you ever wanted to rip all the PDF and DOC files from a focussed Google or Google Scholar search, quickly save them all to a folder, index them with something powerful like dtSearch, and then search the real full-text from across all of them — rather than whatever bits the Googlebot indexed as it swept past, and whatever bits the Google Search ran its search from?

Or archive the entire run of a PDF ejournal that’s sitting at site:www.our-ejournal/articles/ ?

The new free OutWit Docs Firefox plugin does that, and works with the latest version of Firefox. There’s one major drawback — it hijacks the space right next to your browser’s Home icon, with a naff shiny 3D-stylee icon…

ugly

Unacceptable. It can however be moved after a bit of fiddling (Right-click, ‘customize’, and drag it out) and then placed somewhere a little more suitable and out-of-sight.

When using it, though, you also quickly come to appreciate why people should name their academic PDF files something_meaningful.pdf rather than xy2f6fjg00.pdf  And why filenames should have year rather than month first…

pdfnames

As a severe test of what after all is a mere 0.1.0.20 app, it took 9 minutes to whisk through 90 years worth of Field Artillery journal (1911-2007), running from a Google search of site:sill-www.army.mil/FAMAG/ , to find 800Mb in 996 PDF files, and to then start to download them. This was, of course, the point at which I wanted OutWit to have a big red STOP button, although quitting the app did the trick.

Site Search 1.5 for Firefox 3

20 Saturday Jun 2009

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks

≈ Leave a comment

Here’s a useful way to extend the functionality of the JURN Firefox addon. The addon Site Search 1.5 puts a new green icon next to your normal blue one…

sitesea

…and clicking on the green icon searches the contents of the site you’re at. If you’re searching JURN and can see your starting article, then you’re assured that JURN indexes the URL where it’s kept.

Site Search 1.5 is new (May 2009) and works in the latest version of Firefox. It also adds functionality to the right-click menu when highlighting phrases in pages…

nautser

Update: January 2010. Seems to have vanished from the web. Try this (less elegant) addon instead. If you also run GreaseMonkey in Firefox, also try this script.

Hollywood Librarian

20 Saturday Jun 2009

Posted by in Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

I’m partial to ‘feature-length anything’ that touches on nerds. I just found a feature-length documentary I hadn’t known about, The Hollywood Librarian, a documentary about librarians. Despite being out on DVD it’s not listed on Amazon U.K. or U.S. — but can be purchased from a small educational foundation from between $275.00 (universities) to a more reasonable $24.95 (“home use”). A full-length low-quality watermarked copy is available free online.