eJournal 2.0

“Academia 2.0: What Would a Fully Interactive Journal Article Look Like?”…

“We wrapped up the paper yesterday and it got me thinking about what a fully interactive version of the paper would look like. What if all the maps and charts were embeds? What if you could download all the data sets used for the analysis right from the paper? While many journal have come online and some even in openly accessible venues – I don’t think we’ve really tapped the power of the Web for interactivity, data sharing, innovation, or peer review.”

The full article, on “Geospatial Modeling of Supply Shocks”, is included in the post…

“Opening up the commenting and feedback process could foster even better critique of work. By also making data available, an incentive is created for fellow researchers to interact with the research, provide feedback, and collaborate with authors. Potentially you could create a journal in such a format leveraging interactive tools across the web. To give this idea a go I’ve created an example of what such an article could look like with our oil paper as the guinea pig”

How scholarly is Google Scholar?

“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).

JURN as a tool for bonking students

Tama Leaver (Curtin University of Tech, Australia) blogs JURN…

“… the perfect rebuttal for students who claim they couldn’t find any sources and they didn’t have time to visit the library!”

Going beyond

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

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

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 http://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…

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

More than 2,500 ejournals now indexed

12 new titles added today, thus breaking the 2,500 mark for the number of ejournals indexed by JURN.

Recently blogged

JURN recently blogged by: Humanities, Librarianship and Technology; RumbleStrips; Open Access News; Mlinksva; Wayne State University TLB; and UConn Stamford Library Blog.

Fourth issue of ‘Journal of the Imaginary and Fantastic’ published

I’ve just finished and published a fourth issue of JURN’s own ‘overlay journal’. The new issue is themed “Borderline fantastic — maps and the imagination”, and all texts are freely available online.

London event on ejournals, 1st July 09

“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

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…

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.

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Incidentally, I recently found a useful current index of 448 arts and humanities ejournals in Spanish (takes about 30 seconds to fully load), if someone wants to go about the creation of the Spanish equivalent of JURN using a Google CSE.

Inspired by the MUSE

Experimentally added a Project MUSE URL that seems to target only the freely available “Google visible” full-text articles held by MUSE.

Recently blogged by…

The Centered Librarian blogs JURN. The UConn Stamford Library Blog blogs JURN. The Garbrecht Gazette blogs JURN.

HE in a Web 2.0 World

There’s a newly published UK report, available online, Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World.

New Google features

The main Google search results now offer a new set of advanced search tools, via a drop-down left-hand sidebar…

The standard search-modifiers work with these new search types.

Most useful is the ability to sort results by the date at which they were located by the Google bot. No RSS feeds for this yet, but Feed my search offers something similar.

Second most useful is the ability to easily limit your search by time, searching only material from the last day, week or year. This was previously available via the Advanced search, but was fiddly. Now it’s a one-click option, integrated with the search results.

Other useful options allow you to view a custom Google Image search, with the images pulled from your search results, while retaining the search results alongside the images.

‘Wonder Wheel’ is a simple Flash-based ‘topic prompt’, which updates in real-time as you search. I can image that this might be useful for students.

The Timeline is quite impressive — but also potentially dangerous, if students take it at face value and don’t realise that it’s constructed ‘on the fly’ by a bot.

The ability to search through bona fide discussion forums might also be useful for those seeking to track the buzz about their products. This can be combined with an option to search only reviews. Reviews can now be marked up by page authors using open formats, to help search-engines.

Two blog posts for JURN

JURN has been blogged by Universities and the Web and the Free University of Berlin blog.