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
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat – Quick View
by WEB Du Bois
Dear Sirs,
In accordance with the recent Open Access movement, the University of Verona (Italy) has been developing an institutional repository where all the scientific publications of our authors will be stored.
At present our Archive contains about 500 PhD thesis discussed from 2007 to 2010. 160 of them are accessible in full text.
All our thesis have been reviewed by PhD referees and, in case of co-tutoring agreements, by an international board involving professors from the partner Universities.
We would like to know if our Open Archive could be harvested by your search engine.
We thank you for your cooperation and we are looking forward to you kind reply.
For any request of information, please don’t esistate to contact
Dr. Giovanni Baietta
Phone: +39 045 8028715
e-mail: giovanni.baietta@collab.univr.it
Yours faithfully.
It appears the repository contains nothing of interest for the arts and humanities?
JURN indexes English-language ejournal articles, on targettable URLs (i.e.: JURN can’t usually index repository URLs, because their structure is such that it brings a huge amount of unwanted material into the index).