How scholarly is Google Scholar?

30 Saturday May 2009

Posted by in Academic search

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“How Scholarly is Google Scholar? A Comparison to Library Databases” (PDF pre-print paper for College & Research Libraries journal, accepted 30th June 2008)…

“We found that Google Scholar is, on average, 17.6% more scholarly than materials found only in library databases and that there is no statistically significant difference between the scholarliness of materials found in Google Scholar across disciplines.”

Scholarly worth was apparently judged by “subject-specialist reference librarians” rather than by active research scholars. I’m not sure if results from Google Book Search (which pop up in Google Scholar) were counted, or if it was only the articles that were evaluated — the word “book” occurs only once in the article. Of course, what really counts is if a user can get access to the article they want. If not then, for most students, the article might as well have been locked in a trunk and thown in the ocean.

This encouraging 2008 research should be balanced against some 2007 findings from Germany (Philipp Mayr and Anne-Kathrin Walter, “An Exploratory Study of Google Scholar“), which found some weaknesses in the up-to-dateness of Google Scholar results, and commented on…

“weaknesses in the accessibility of Open Access content”.

… this last probably due (I would guess) to the paucity of easily-accessible metadata, and the often awkward and haphazard ways in which such journals archive their articles (hence the need for a hand-made solution such as JURN).

Going beyond

27 Wednesday May 2009

Posted by in Academic search, Spotted in the news

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This looks interesting, if rather expensive. Third Bloomsbury Conference on E-Publishing and E-Publications: “Beyond Books and Journals”. 25th – 26th June 2009, London.

And sadly it seems that the “Designs on eLearning: Learning and Teaching with Technology in Art, Design and Communication” conference has definitely “gone beyond”. To the grave, in fact. Due to have been held in London in early Sept 2009, it has now been cancelled.

art&education papers database

27 Wednesday May 2009

Posted by in Academic search, Spotted in the news

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Always nice to see a new art history full-text papers archive underway…

In order to build the art&education papers database, we are now calling for either new or already existing (published or unpublished, recent or older) scholarly articles from around the world. Texts should be comprehensive, research-based articles focusing on topics in 20th century and contemporary art. Texts may be culled from conference papers, seminar papers, dissertation chapters, etc. We ask that you submit pieces anywhere from 2,000 words to approximately 10,000 words and include a 100 word abstract and full contact information (or publication information for previously published texts). All submissions will be considered for publication on the website. Please submit articles by email to papers@artandeducation.net

Google Custom Search Element

27 Wednesday May 2009

Posted by in JURN's Google watch, Spotted in the news

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Google has just deployed a new Custom Search Element to Google CSE owners. This allows your users to do things like paste a JURN search engine box into their blog, and have it return results for their readers without having to leave the page.

Sadly, a hosted WordPress blog (like this one) gets all paranoid about security and strips out the code tags — and thus I can’t give you a demo here. WordPress.com really should whitelist all javascript that runs from www.google.com/. But should you have a self-hosted blog, it will work well — and the snippet of code you need to copy and paste is here.

It gives results like those seen below. One nice thing I’d like to see added to the GCSE would be the ability to preset the results by keyword. Thus at the end of a blog post about, say, Pygmalion and Galatea, I could paste in a JURN search-engine box atop a set of pre-run results for pygmalion galatea…

jurnser

… but I guess that would never happen because then it would be used by blog-spammers to build fake blogs 🙁

London event on ejournals, 1st July 09

22 Friday May 2009

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“The e-journals revolution: how the use of scholarly journals is shaping research” is a forthcoming consultation and feedback event in London, being held as a follow-up to the recent publication of the RIN report on ejournals (and no doubt also informed by the related Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World report)…

“Wednesday 1st July 09. Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole Street, London. W1G 0AE. This free RIN event will look at the findings of the E-journals: their use, value and impact report, […] The event aims to spark a debate on these issues and to inform phase 2 of this RIN study. Aimed at scholarly publishers, university librarians, higher education policy makers and researchers, this event will offer fresh insights on the use and value of e-journals and provide a networking opportunity for delegates…”

JURN directory of ejournals

17 Sunday May 2009

Posted by in New titles added to JURN

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As some readers may have noticed, JURN now has a directory of ejournals in the arts & humanities, organised by subject. This manages to squeeze 1,650 selected titles (from the 2,447 titles currently indexed by the JURN search-engine) into a single widescreen page, using some nifty javascript to open and collapse subjects as your mouse cursor passes over each header.

Whereas the JURN search-engine index uses direct-to-article URLs, the new Directory uses front-page URLs. All Directory links were recently checked/scrubbed via Linkbot and many were also checked by hand/eye…

jurndir

A widescreen resolution of 1920-pixels width is recommended, otherwise the third and fourth columns may appear squashed.

I hope the JURN directory will be a useful discovery tool. Even after discounting about 150 ‘small press’ literary and some crafts-maker titles, there are still around 1,500 ‘proper’ academic ejournals listed. That compares well with the Directory of Open Access Journals, which currently lists around 700 arts and humanities titles.

Many of the titles not included in the Directory are those primarily published in languages other than English, which are in the JURN search-engine index because they include occasional English-language articles.

If you don’t like all the “bouncy puppy” interactivity on the Directory page, just save it locally and then open it up from wherever you saved it. It’ll act like a normal page.