Removed Routledge free monographs

Removed Routledge free humanities monographs, following the 31st of May expiry of their generous offer.

Group test: “Alan Moore” Watchmen

Another group test:

JURN group test: “Alan Moore” Watchmen   May 2014. Searching for free full-text scholarly articles, theses or book chapters in English, with primary discussion of the famous and seminal graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore. Not counting film criticism of the movie version, or book reviews. Clicked through on possible results, and briefly evaluated.
DOAJ	0	Used ‘Article’ search. 0 from four results.
Journal Click	0	0 from zero results. Seems to include a lot of predatory titles and publishers.
JournalTOCS	0	0 from zero results.
Ingenta Connect	0	0 from six paywalled results.
Journal Seek	0	0 from zero results.
Mendeley	0	Searched ‘Articles’ only, then filtered for Open Access articles only — which produced no relevant results. Then removed the OA filter, which gave three relevant results — that were found to be paywalled.
OAlib	0	From 16 results. Had a couple of relevant articles but these were not in English.
Google Search	0	Forced verbatim. Examined first 50 results. As you’d expect, a mess of commercial book listings pages and the occasional pop-cult interview with Moore. The addition of filetype:pdf helped — giving a scattering of student dissertations; the 1st (but not 2nd) edition of the Annotated Watchmen document; and a short undergraduate attempt at a bibliography of scholarly works on Watchmen.
Microsoft Academic	1	One of four results.
CORE	2	Filtered search by English language. CORE offered many incidental or spurious results.
OATD	3	Three from 14 results.
Digital Commons Network	3	Three from 17 results.
NDLtd	3	Three from 12 results.
Google Scholar	8	Examined first 50 results. Google Books links not counted. Five of the good results were from the open journal ImageTexT: interdisciplinary comics studies. Two likely good candidates proved to be “404 Not Found”.
BASE	9	Searched ‘Verbatim’ on ‘Entire Document’. Examined first 50 results.
OPENDoar	12	Examined first 50 results. Two appeared to be basic undergraduate seminar papers.
JURN	25	Checked first 50 results, not counting interviews, book reviews and duplicates. Results remained strong and on-topic right through to result 100.

For JURN, adding an additional search modifier helps to nudge away incidental and duplicate results…

   “Alan Moore” intitle:Watchmen
   [force intitle:]

   “Alan Moore” Watchmen Rorschach
   [add focus by adding the name of a key character]

   “Alan Moore” Watchmen -site:www.academia.edu
   [remove Academia.edu duplicates]

Moore open comics

Open source, open access comics? The great bard of Northampton is on the job, with a little help from NESTA’s Digital R&D Fund…

” Alan Moore said in a statement: … we are assembling teams of the most cutting-edge creators in the industry and then allowing them input into the technical processes in order to create a new capacity for telling comic book stories. It will then be made freely available to all of the exciting emergent talent that is no doubt out there, just waiting to be given access to the technical toolkit that will enable them to create the comics of the future.”

Picture: Alan Moore, drawn by Raphael Salimena.

Firefox: RSS Icon in URL bar

Lost the RSS button in your Firefox address/URL bar? The Firefox 32 upgrade lost it for me. RSS Icon in URL bar 1.5 is the current addon solution. It works fine in passing through feeds to my desktop FeedDemon reader.

Google stops all YouTube RSS feeds

Google ceases all RSS feeds from YouTube.

Do Open Access journals have impact?

A Thomson ISI / Web of Science study is reported in Nature, dated 26th May 2014, as “Do Open Access journals have impact?”. They concluded that…

“Open Access journals [a selection of 190 titles, “core scientific publications”] can have similar impact to other journals, and prospective authors should not fear publishing in these journals merely because of their access model.”

RSS feed search

RSS feed search, by keyword. Tip: paste in the URL, then cut it back to just the main word in the URL. It will usually find the RSS. Or just use site:yoursite.com and it will find all feeds from that site. Incredibly useful.

Picking at Piketty

Why having the data can sometimes be handy: the Financial Times has fisked the Piketty data on Europe…

“The FT [Financial Times] found mistakes and unexplained entries in his spreadsheets, similar to those which last year undermined the work on public debt and growth of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. … For example, once the FT cleaned up and simplified the data, the European numbers do not show any tendency towards rising wealth inequality after 1970. An independent specialist in measuring inequality shared the FT’s concerns.” – Financial Times.

DOAJ’s new ‘Removed’ list

The DOAJ now has a handy list of journals they’ve removed since the start of 2014. When you load the spreadsheet, switch through to the “Removed” tab to see them.

I wasn’t previously aware that if a journal hasn’t published in the last 12 months, it will be totally removed from the DOAJ, archive TOCs and all. JURN, on the other hand, is happy to index your journal so long as the archives are still online and open.

Microsoft Academic Search 2

Says Microsoft: it’s crap, but… ‘hey, there’s a new version coming soon’. No, they’re not talking about the Windows 8.1 KB2919355 debacle and Windows 10, but rather about MS Academic Search…

Asked about the collapse [in the current version], a spokesperson for Microsoft Research declined to address the problem directly, writing in an e-mail:

“Microsoft Academic Search [has] a next-generation version of MAS, which focuses on enhancing the user experience and evolving it from a research project to an integrated offering within Microsoft’s services portfolio. During this transition, Microsoft has maintained the features, functionality, and the ability for third parties to enter new and updated content into the existing search engine, but the majority of our focus has now shifted to this new initiative.”