Four new titles

Increased JURN’s coverage of information seeking, via indexing the following newly-added ejournals:—

Library Student Journal

Webology

AACE Journal (IT in Education)

Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (Was in the Directory, but not the main index)

Seven new titles added

New additions to the JURN index today:—

Jerusalem Quarterly

Quidditas : Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association

RAG, The (quarterly of the Roman Archaeology Group at UWA)

Virtual Archaeology Review

Aegis Humanities Journal (Otterbein University Humanities Journal)

Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (There doesn’t appear to be an index page)

Conversations on the Liberal Arts

+

Feature articles of SAFE : Saving Antiquities for Everyone

Proceedings of the conference ‘Pecus : man and animal in antiquity’

Second half of the article-level checking done.

My software-assisted checking of JURN’s article-level index is now complete.

The process involved determining if each and every URL in the JURN index was still being “seen” and indexed by Google. In this second and final check, another 180 or so journals have had their URL re-found and corrected. I also adjusted the relevant Directory URL, when that was found to have changed. Another 20 dead or deleted journals have been removed. All this means that every URL in JURN’s main index is currently being indexed by Google.

I then did a quick Linkbot-based re-check of the resulting latest version of the JURN Directory, looking for and correcting any “404 not found” results.

I think I’ve now developed a fairly robust “pincer movement” method that can annually curtail the inevitable link-rot:— i) the article-level URL-checking; and ii) spam-word searches in JURN; and iii) the checks on the English-language Directory for “404” / redirected home-pages.

Three new titles

Three new ejournal additions to JURN, found during the big link-checking:—

Electronic Journal of Mithraic Studies (Ancient Roman Mithraism)

Classics@ : an online journal (journal of the Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard. Added to the JURN Directory, but articles can’t be indexed by JURN — they have one of the most hideous URL structures I’ve ever seen, and on top of that there also seems to be per-session URL-shaping to prevent linking to individual pages. It’s Classics, guys — web traffic isn’t likely to be that heavy…)

APS Proceedings Online (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society)

+

NordLit (Nordic literature. Formerly listed at a duplicate site that has issues to #22. This new site has issues to #25. Indexing at both sites).

URL Design

Warpspire on URL Design…

A URL is an agreement

A URL is an agreement to serve something from a predictable location for as long as possible. Once your first visitor hits a URL you’ve implicitly entered into an agreement that if they bookmark the page or hit refresh, they’ll see the same thing.

Four new titles

Added four new philosophy ejournals to JURN:—

Conscrescence : the Australasian journal of process thought

Disputatio : international journal of philosophy

Journal of the International Plato Society

Dialegesthai : revista telematica di filosofia (Has some English articles)

+

Removed African Philosophy – now requires a subscription.

Added Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The (IEP)

Found an additional way to auto-check JURN

I’m pleased to say that I’ve found a robust way to auto-check if Google is still “seeing” content at the article-level URLs indexed by JURN. It’s a software based solution, and is basically ‘dark side’ SEO software that I’ve turned to the good side. It auto-prepends the site: modifier to each of the URLs contained in the JURN index, and then checks if those URLs are actually indexed by Google. It then logs any wholly un-indexed URLs. It just chugs away in the background and is very slow — so as not to trigger flood-control blocking measures. But it’s certainly better than doing the checking by hand.

If you have such a list you want to check, it’s probably best to remove or cut back any URLs containing multiple wildcards such as /*/*/. Google has also been known to choke on URLs containing question-marks (it can see them as evidence of someone trying a scripting exploit on Google), although I don’t see this happening during the checking. But if you’re doing the checking in blocks of 200, it’s not difficult to correct those sort of URLs first.

Spamming Google Scholar

Spamming Google Scholar. Very possible, or so it seems…

“…we conducted several tests on Google Scholar. The results show that academic search engine spam is indeed – and with little effort – possible: We increased rankings of academic articles on Google Scholar by manipulating their citation counts; Google Scholar indexed invisible text we added to some articles, making papers appear for keyword searches the articles were not relevant for; Google Scholar indexed some nonsensical articles we randomly created with the paper generator SciGen; and Google Scholar linked to manipulated versions of research papers that contained a Viagra advertisement.”

Beel, J. (2010)
Academic Search Engine Spam and Google Scholar’s Resilience Against it.
Journal of Electronic Publishing 13 (3), December 2010.

Bing supports site:

Bing now supports the site: search modifier. Example usage:

site:http://www.site.edu/journal/pdfs/

AROUND Google

A new Google search modifier… AROUND.

apples AROUND(3) pears

…gives results that contain the word “apples” within three words of “pears”.

[ Hat-tip: Researchbuzz ]