ELPUB 2009 papers now online

Full-text papers and Powerpoints from ELPUB 2009 : 13th International Conference on Electronic Publishing are now freely available online.

Lots of titles that sound interesting, including: ‘Overlay Publications: a functional overview of the concept’; ‘Targeted knowledge: interaction and rich user experience towards a scholarly communication that “lets”‘; ‘Incorporating Semantics and Metadata as Part of the Article Authoring Process’; and ‘Electronic publishing and bibliometrics’.

One short strand of the presentation ‘Electronic publishing and bibliometrics’ (.PPT) is summarised by Moitara’s blog which reposts a D-lib conference report, thus…

“discussed in Moed’s keynote speech was assessment in the area of the humanities where there is a lack of reference indexes such as Scopus or Web of Science, due to the different types of research, outcomes and habits between the humanities and science communities. Moed explored five different options for the creation of a comprehensive database for the humanities and social sciences, including combining a number of existing European special SSH bibliographies, creating a new database from publishers’ archives, stimulating further enhancement of Web of Science and Scopus, exploring the potentialities and limitations of Google Scholar and Google Book Search, and creating a citation index from institutional repositories. Much work must be done in these fields, but the availability of full-text seems to be a key issue.” (My emphasis)

The first part of this presentation also has an interesting graph, showing how the RAE in the UK severely skews the output of academic papers…

            from: Moed (2009). “Electronic publishing and bibliometrics” (.PPT)

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The e-journals revolution: podcast

If you couldn’t be at the recent Research Information Network meeting in London, “The e-journals revolution: how the use of scholarly journals is shaping research”, then RIN has kindly provided a 28 minute “edited highlights” podcast for free.

A delicious little snippet…

“Government researchers search the least. They switch off at Friday lunchtime and don’t come back until Monday lunchtime”

Directory of History Journals

I just found the American Historical Association Directory of History Journals. Apparently it was launched circa October 2007, and it currently has basic titles/links for 390 journals. Sadly, it’s in A-Z form — and doesn’t distinguish free from commercial journals.

RSS feeds changed at Intute

The UK academic service Intute has had a redesign…

Very nice it looks, too. But, unfortunately, the redesign has broken a variety of vital arts & humanities links. Below are the changes, if you’ve been linking via your Web pages to the “Latest Additions” on Intute:—

---

Direct links:

Was: …/artsandhumanities/latest.html

Is now split into five:

Intute: Humanities latest resources

Intute: Communication and media studies latest resources

Intute: Creative and performing arts latest resources

Intute: Architecture and planning latest resources

Intute: Modern languages and area studies latest resources

---

RSS feeds:

And if you’ve been following Intute by RSS, the “latest additions” RSS feed is also broken—

Was: …/latest_artsandhumanities.xml

Is now split into five:

Humanities

Communication and media studies

Creative and performing arts

Architecture and planning

Modern languages and area studies

---

And I might suggest the following as a replacement, if you’re used to having a single Intute: Arts & Humanities link on your website:

Intute:   | humanities | arts | media | architecture | languages |

You can get the ‘copy & paste’ code for this here.

Page Hunt

Microsoft turns search into a game called Page Hunt. All in the name of science, of course. Page Hunt ask players to ensures a certain page lands in the top five results…

“the game presents players with web pages and asks them to guess the queries that would produce the page within its first five results. Players score 100 points if the page is no.1 on the list, 90 points if it’s no.2, and so on. Bonuses are also awarded for avoiding frequently-used queries.”

Not quite as gripping as the sublime Plants vs. Zombies, but it has some rough-edged charm. And there’s one curious finding already:

“…the longer a page’s URL (in characters), the harder it was for users to match the page to query words. The research doesn’t speculate about why this should be, but here’s a graph showing the relationship between URL length and the ‘findability’ of a page.”

Perhaps there’s a lesson here for those who use ridiculously long and impenetrable scripted URLs?

Free 20,000-item lookup table for commercial journals in the humanities and social studies

Fancy having a 720-page table that lists all humanities journals in the two major commercial subscription databases, and tells you which journal is to be found in which database?…

The June 2009 “A Comparative International Study of Scientific Journal Databases in the Social Sciences and the Humanities” (PDF link, 2.8Mb) by Michele Dassa and Christine Kosmopoulos is just that. Amazingly, it seems to be the first time such a table has been compiled…

“Presented here for the first time in a comparative table are the contents of the databases … in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, of the Web of Science (published by Thomson Reuters) and of Scopus (published by Elsevier), as well as of the biographical lists European Reference Index for Humanities (ERIH) … and of the French Agence d’Evaluation de la Recherche et de l’Enseignement Superieur (AERES). With some 20,000 entries, this is an almost exhaustive overview of the wealth of publications in the Social Sciences and the Humanities …”

This might be read in combination with a May 2009 Gale Reference Review review of three major academic search-engines, which took a sceptical look at both Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus…

“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”

“That’s the way to do it”

A classic…

“a survey in the UK by Myhill (2007), which found that the library OPAC and university web pages were well-used – especially by students in their final year – may have been due to the study design, which consisted of an online questionnaire hosted on the library website.”

Practical lessons in search literacy

“Teaching information skills to large groups with limited time and resources” (abstract + PDF) is an article from British educational researchers, published in the new June 2009 issue of Journal of Information Literacy. You have to wade through some educational psychology cruft in the early pages. But there is the interesting early snippet that…

“students training to be teachers are more receptive to the lecture based interactive teaching methods than students studying Arts and Humanities subjects.”

After the early sections it’s an interesting read — it asks how best to give practical lessons in search literacy to UK undergraduates, when (as seems usual in the UK) the only real opportunity for…

“librarians to engage with students will be to large groups in lecture theatres […] containing over 200 students.”

Search literacy is vital at this stage because U.K. schools and further education colleges turn out large numbers of people who don’t even know simple search techniques such as… “find a phrase” -spam.

Now, I can understand university management thinking: “the F.E. colleges must have drilled search literacy into the students, so they only need a quick refresher and an outline of the library resources”. But in my experience they’re wrong — and delivery of one or two 60 minute lectures, in a packed and sweaty lecture theatre, must send a subliminal message to students that these are matters that are not deemed to be overly important. The students think: “I wasn’t taught this in F.E. college, it only gets a couple of mass induction lectures at the start of university — so it can’t be that important, right?” And such a thought is no doubt compounded by the fact that they know how to navigate their little bits of the web very well indeed.

Universities shouldn’t have to mop up the mess left by schools and F.E. colleges, but let’s assume they do in this case. I’m thinking that one option would be to have a 6-week online ‘summer school’ course in search literacy, the passing of which would be a pre-requisite for entry into the first year.

   Related on JURN: Students’ Use of Research Content in Teaching and Learning.

Correlation is not causation

The Scholarly Kitchen blog fisks a new ‘study’ that purports to show that developing countries with free access to scientific information experienced a six-fold increase in article output since 2002…

“the present analysis simply cannot adequately evaluate the effect of these free literature programs on research output”

The long-term integrity of scholarly data

A new U.S. National Academies report, Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age. The page for the report looks as though it’s behind a paywall, but scroll a little further down the page to find links to full-text page images. The report was commissioned in 2006, and the Chronicle of Higher Education has a short journalistic summary.

I’m thinking we need new long-term personal financial instruments that fund/ensure that the family/institution/archivists are sent the keys to a universal “digital vault” after someone’s death, the vault containing a structured and tagged backup archive of that person’s vital academic data, papers, blogs, book files, bibliographies, etc.