There’s a new Indian-made search engine for open access journals, which at first glance seems to be somewhat similar to my own JURN, but which I suspect is basically a rip of the DOAJ. Their spreadsheet bears an uncanny resemblance to the DOAJ list, right down to having the same capitalisation errors and other minor errors on records for certain journal titles.
The stated aim of the new engine is to…
“It almost cover all subject areas right from humanities to pure sciences”
Given this very wide coverage, the amount of journals indexed then seems rather small. It…
“will search in 3627 Open Access Journals (OAJ).”
Keep in mind that if you load the 5,500+ DOAJ .csv list into a spreadsheet and then simply throw out all the Spanish / Portuguese / Turkish / etc. titles, that currently gives you about 3,800 DOAJ titles with at least some English content.
One might expect a lot more titles than 3627, from an actively researched engine with that kind of remit. Keep in mind that after a year of active research JURN indexes 3,653 free ejournals in the arts & humanities alone, over 2,300 of those being in English. If I had free range over the vast amount of open access journals in other areas, especially science and medical, doubtless JURN could be pushing 10,000 titles indexed. There are over 700 open access titles just in business studies / business economics, for instance.
Anyway, a test of the new engine for the familiar terms ‘mongolian folk song’ — which I previously used as test terms in a group-test — shows that the new engine still has some way to go. It’s not a bad basic discovery tool, if you know the right way to search Google, although I’m not convinced that it’s indexing at the article level. It’s indexing articles, true, but it seems to be doing this by indexing the home-page root URL rather than the specific URL where the articles are stored (which is often a different location).
And looking at the spreadsheet of titles, it seems to predominantly index science / medical journals, and for this reason some spurious items enter the results, e.g.:
Anti-proliferation Effect of Polypeptide Extracted from Scorpion
ern China to Mongolia and Korea, is a Chinese herb used for the treatment of various abdominal masses in folk medicine. Polypeptide extract from scorpion venom (PESV), a certain ….. Zhang WD, Cui YZ, Yao CF, Jia Q, Song SQ
And also popping up is the familiar spurious result, an old book from 1903 that only mentions Mongolia in passing…
The Souls of Black Folk
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by WEB Du Bois
