• Directory
  • FAQ: about JURN
  • Group tests
  • Guide to academic search
  • JURN’s donationware
  • openEco: nature titles indexed

News from JURN

~ search tool for open access content

News from JURN

Category Archives: Academic search

LibriVox search and “quote marks”

31 Tuesday Jan 2023

Posted by David Haden in Academic search

≈ Leave a comment

Useful to know. LibriVox search will fail if you try to use “quote marks” to indicate a phrase or name.

Total fail.

Success.

Consensus

25 Friday Nov 2022

Posted by David Haden in Academic search, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

Consensus is a new two-man science search-engine, now backed by a small chunk of the Bitcoin fortune made by the Winklevoss twins. Consensus has also just partnered with Semantic Scholar.

It’s live and public to use and to get results from, though I was asked to sign up by a dismiss-able pop-up overlay. A bit slow to return the results, but I was impressed by the results I had. The display format is also pleasing, and desktop-centric.

It’s currently only searching 200 million papers, though it has the great advantage of extracting relevant sections from the hit documents and presenting these in a clean form. Kind of like Google Search / Google Books snippets, on steroid-munching AIs. Filtering and faceting look good.

Some of the featured branding seems a bit flaky, with the blog pushing ‘mindfulness’ and even ‘neuro-linguistic programming’. But that may just be an artefact of whoever they have running the blog for them, at a guess.

Worth looking at more closely, and it looks like it may even be useful for conservationists and wildlife researchers.

Mastodon search?

09 Wednesday Nov 2022

Posted by David Haden in Academic search

≈ Leave a comment

Despite all the recent hype about the Mastodon social-media service, it doesn’t appear to be that useful for keyword search. For instance a search for keyword “research”, just now, found absolutely nothing…

Turns out that, though search is public (i.e. no sign-up required)…

if you search something in the search box of Mastodon, it will find only users or #hashtags. A more powerful search system will be implemented in the near future.

I did find the third-party service Social Search – Discover accounts across multiple Mastodon servers (‘instances’). This only searches the public account descriptions though. If ‘FluffyTwiddle’ is posting about “open access” but doesn’t have that in their description, you won’t discover them.

DOAB titles so far for 2022, for the arts and humanities

15 Monday Aug 2022

Posted by David Haden in Academic search

≈ Leave a comment

The DOAB appears to show a total of 11 arts and humanities books in 2022. Here are the workings behind the initial figure.

The DOAB’s sidebar facets were used for the July test, rather than a crude keyword search.

a) Arts facet. Non-keyword search: Date Issued: [2020 TO 2023] × Subject: The arts

Two hits. No books listed as “2022”.

b) Humanities facet. Non-keyword search: Date Issued: [2020 TO 2023] × Subject: Humanities

This gave 198 titles. This result-set was small enough for me to manually skim through picking out suitable “2022” titles on new browser tabs, while excluding single chapters and the many mis-hits (e.g. “Dental Education”, General Education, Business, Health titles). I came up with a list of 11 book titles so far in 2022, and which fit inside what I consider to be the core “arts & humanities” fold:

Verwaltete Vielfalt: Die königlichen Tafelgüter in Polen-Litauen, 1697–1763.

Tracing the Atom: Nuclear Legacies in Russia and Central Asia.

Realities, Challenges, Visions? Towards a New Foreign Cultural and Educational Policy.

Trends on Educational Gamification: Challenges and Learning Opportunities.

Game-Based Learning, Gamification in Education and Serious Games.

Post-Truth Imaginations: New Starting Points for Critique of Politics and Technoscience.

Islam and the Trajectory of Globalization: Rational Idealism and the Structure of World History.

After the Text: Byzantine Enquiries in Honor of Margaret Mullett.

In Contempt: Defending Free Speech, Defeating HUAC (a new history of the U.S. McCarthy trials).

Horos: Ancient Boundaries and the Ecology of Stone.

Monstrous Liminality: Or, The Uncanny Strangers of Secularized Modernity.


In contrast a simple search for keyword humanities gives many mis-hits, not least among the vast number of medical books. e.g. DOAB highlighting…

… humans. In this context, humanized mice transplanted with functional human cells.

The same results are had when using either humanities or “humanities” as a keyword.


But it turns out that searching either way is misleading. The two apparently top-level facets of ‘arts’ and ‘humanities’ are not giving the full story, since they are not acting as top-level “buckets”. To get the actual number for 2022 in English one must undertake the following…

1. Blank search. Publication Type: book × Date Issued: [2020 TO 2023] ×

2. Sort Date Issued: 2022 × Language: English × Publication Type: book ×

3. Now remove the wider [2020 TO 2023] facet, having now got access to the pure 2022 facet.

There are then 2,638 titles accessible in 2022 so far. This is ‘all books’ in 2022, and not all arts and humanities.

Drilling down from that set to a clean arts and humanities sub-set appears to be impossible, as things stand. There appears to be almost as may subject sub-facets as there are books…

One can’t use the .CSV export of results, as that appears to be capped at 500 rows. And the general RSS ‘feed for new titles’ appears limited to just four titles.

My guess would be that perhaps 400+ of the 2,638 titles for 2022 fall into what I would call “arts and humanities”, but one can’t get a clean de-duplicated list for such. If there is some arcane way to do it, then please let me know how.

Update: There are very slightly over 500 titles for 2022 to date, in English. To get at a precise number I undertook a study with the aid of the main .CSV file.

A new large-scale study of academic search databases

08 Sunday May 2022

Posted by David Haden in Academic search, Open Access publishing, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

A new large-scale study of large academic search options, 30 of which are publicly available to be searched. Yet even among these “openly accessible systems” searchers will…

not find that open discovery — the search and access of scholarly content via freely available resources — is possible.

Sadly they did not test JURN, presumably because the required “query hit counts” could not be mined from results in an automated way.

Of the tools offered by large publishers it was found that the…

journal [discovery] platforms of the large publishers still have open access rates in single-digit percentages … open discovery is still very limited

Digestable scholarship

06 Sunday Feb 2022

Posted by David Haden in Academic search, Economics of Open Access

≈ Leave a comment

A good point, made in a new short OA opinion-piece by Martin Eve…

How can the humanities parrot the oft-repeated liberal humanist line that they exist to produce an educated citizenry capable of participating critically in democracy, when most humanities work remains unreadable by most people? … When justifying oneself, pointing at a scholarly book that costs £60 is not the same as pointing to an article that can be read for free.

Assuming that ‘democracy’ and ‘educated citizenry’ are not soon to raise a sneer rather than a cheer from those holding the cattle-prods, then an obvious solution might be some form of free digest of the text that one wishes to read or consult. Often a good digest might suffice to quench curiosity on the part of independent scholars outside salaried academia. It would be far more than an abstract or a paragraph in an editor’s introduction, better than an Amazon Kindle-like “the first 10% is free” extract, and yet shorter than a Blinkist full-book summary (these being carefully crafted by a human, last I heard).

Could a summarising AI do the task? It can with newspaper articles and (I believe) with structured things such as financial reports. It might need some help with denser and more specialised material from the arts and humanities. Such an AI-bot might be aided by picking up on a dozen simple ‘structure tags’, added by the author alongside the text as they wrote it. And in that task the author might themselves be being assisted by a tagging AI. There might also be a semantics back-end at work. A local history chapter on well-dressing ceremonies and associated folklore in the English Peak District might then not flummox the AI too much. But a convoluted chapter on Elvish linguistics and arcane medieval star-lore detectable in Tolkien’s The Silmarillion might still cause it dissolve into a hissing molten puddle.

What about the idea of digests written by young humans in need of cash, of which the planet is very soon to have a rather large abundance? The AI digester-bot might then assist a well-trained young human, by providing a ‘first pass’ digest.

An informed and curious citizen might then be given 52 credits a year to access such a digesting service. Each credit would pay for the cogent summary of a book chapter or article. The specialisation and reading-difficulty of a text would be assessed initially by the AI, with some texts deemed to merit the expenditure of more than one credit. The digestion of a dense book which evaluates the Norse linguistics allegedly to be found in Sir Gawain & The Green Knight might even need a crowd-funding consortium or similar, pooling their collective credits. But that seems unlikely.

My idea loses ground again when one considers it might work poorly with summaries-of-summaries. For instance I want the weighty “The Year’s Work in Tolkien” summary overview in the latest Tolkien Studies journal. But the issue is prohibitively expensive in print, and is locked away from the public on Project Muse. As an impoverished independent scholar I need to read every word of it to keep up with the field, and a summary will not suffice. No matter how good it is.

So… none of this is really ideal, though it would certainly create a welcome market in somewhere like Bangladesh for AI-assisted ‘academic summarisers’ servicing a ’52 credits a year’ system.

One other vague notion also arises. Google Books already exists and provides a partial ‘Look Inside’ solution for many who need to take a peep into an expensive £50-£120 academic collection or (far less often available) an obscure monograph. Could that existing service be expanded? Even if only through gritted teeth, as most librarians seem to despise Google Books. How about a mandate that says Google Books gets to show 100% of a volume produced with or originating from a public university employee, but only ten years after publication? Could that work in terms of the current economics of such things? I don’t know enough about publishing’s current ‘profits over time’ aspects there, as I haven’t been following the monographs debate. But such a book would still be effectively locked down (not OA in any meaningful sense), while still being readable by the global public. It would be a sort of automatic ‘Knowledge Unlatched’, running globally alongside the existing copyright systems and (because universal) not subject to political skew in terms of the books selected. It might also be retrospective.

React

21 Tuesday Sep 2021

Posted by David Haden in Academic search, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

React, an interesting new academic development in visual search. It works on the reverse-search principle: pick a picture, and see similar pictures in the results.

The prototype limits results to a couple of the UK’s larger national digitized art collections (National Archives, the V&A) and leavens these with the Edinburgh Botanic Garden for some flowers and curious pods and suchlike. An AI assists the “does it look like this…?” sorting.

The COAR of the issue

29 Friday Jan 2021

Posted by David Haden in Academic search, Economics of Open Access, Open Access publishing, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

A useful new analysis today from COAR, “Don’t believe the hype: repositories are critical for ensuring equity, inclusion and sustainability in the transition to open access”. Recent…

publishers’ comments portray gold open access as the only ‘legitimate’ route for open access, and attempt to diminish the repository (or green) route.

According to the author, some publishers are even implying that repositories have no aggregators, or are not present in Google Search or in specialist search-engines such as Scholar and GRAFT. Laughably, they apparently suggest that poor over-worked researchers will instead…

need to search through individual repositories to find the articles.

The publishers are also said to be trying to stop all but a sub-set of elite repositories from being used for data deposit, via…

proposing to define the repository selection criteria for where their authors’ should deposit research data. These criteria, which are very narrowly conceived, threaten to exclude thousands of national and institutional repositories as options for deposit.

Again, this sounds like it is designed to make researchers feel it’s more convenient to publish their article + data via a big publisher.

Subject to change

04 Sunday Oct 2020

Posted by David Haden in Academic search, Ooops!, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

“Subject indexing in humanities: a comparison between a local university repository and an international bibliographic service”, Journal of Documentation, May 2020.

… the use of subject index terms in humanities journal articles [is] not supported in either the world’s largest commercial abstract and citation database Scopus or the local repository of a public university in Sweden. The indexing policies in the two services do not seem to address the needs of humanities scholars for highly granular subject index terms with appropriate facets; no controlled vocabularies for any humanities discipline are used whatsoever.

Internet Archive Scholar is live

28 Monday Sep 2020

Posted by David Haden in Academic search, Spotted in the news

≈ 6 Comments

Internet Archive Scholar, formerly the Fat Cat project, now live and purring. Full-marks for having that rarest of sidebar search-filters, “OA”, though “Fulltext” is presumably broader and thus the one most likely to be used most. It’s also great to see there’s now a keyword-based way to search across all those microfilm journal runs that Archive.org has been uploading recently.

I wouldn’t have used the open ISSN ROAD as a source, nor visually implied that it’s a possible quality-marker. But at least it’s being balanced against the more rigorous DOAJ, and there’s a yes/no flag for both services on the article’s record-page…

It’s good that the “Read full-text” button goes to a PDF copy at the WayBack Machine, and yet there is also a live link on the record-page that serves to keep a record of the source URL.

Not all record pages have full-text, though these are very rare. In which case the user is prompted to find and save…

Unfortunately IA Scholar doesn’t appear to respect “quote marks” in search, which is not ideal for a scholarly search engine. For instance a search for “Creationism” defaults to results for “creation”. Nor can it do Google-y stuff like intitle: or anything similar via the sidebar, though I guess such refinements may be yet to come. Update: the command is: title:

A quick test search for Mongolian folk song suggests it’s not wildly astray in terms of relevance. It’s not being led astray by ‘Song’ as a common Chinese author name, for instance, or mongolism as a genetic disease.

How far will Google Search index the fatcat URL? Will they block it from results in due course, for being too verbose and swamping results? Or just tweak the de-duplication algorithm to suppress it a bit? Well, they’re indexing it for now, and as such it’s been experimentally added to JURN. It may well come out again, but I want to test it for a while. If Google Search fully indexes, that should theoretically then give JURN users a way into all the microfilm journal-runs that Archive.org that has recently been uploading.

← Older posts
Subscribe: RSS News Feed.
I'm on Patreon!

JURN:

  • JURN : directory of ejournals
  • JURN : main search-engine
  • JURN : openEco directory
  • JURN : repository search

Related sites:

  • 4 Humanities
  • Academic Freedom Alliance
  • Accuracy in Academia
  • Alliance Defending Freedom
  • ALPSP
  • alt.academy
  • AMIR
  • Anterotesis
  • Arcadia project
  • Art Historicum (German)
  • AWOL
  • Beall's List (updated at 2018)
  • Beall’s List (old)
  • Beyond Search
  • Bibliographic wilderness
  • Booktwo
  • Campus Reform
  • Charleston Advisor
  • Coalition for Networked Information
  • Communia (public domain watchdog)
  • Cost of Knowledge
  • Council of Editors of Learned Journals
  • Dan Cohen
  • Digital Koans
  • Digital Shift
  • Dissernet (Russian anti-plagiarism)
  • DOAJ
  • Don't Block TOR
  • eFoundations
  • EIFL
  • Electronic Frontier Foundation
  • ELO
  • Embargo Watch
  • ePublishing Trust for Development
  • Facebook: Arab Open Access
  • Facebook: Italian Open Access
  • Facebook: Open Access India
  • Film Studies for Free
  • FIRE
  • Flaky Academic Conferences
  • Found History
  • Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
  • Free Speech Union (UK)
  • Google Algorithm
  • Heterodox Academy
  • Iconclass
  • IFLA Serials blog
  • ImpactStory
  • infoDocket
  • InTech Blog
  • Jinfo (formerly Free Pint)
  • Kindle blog
  • L'edition Electronique (French)
  • La Criee : periodiques (French)
  • Leader Statement Database on Free Speech
  • National Association of Scholars
  • National Coalition of Independent Scholars
  • Neil Beagrie
  • OA Lookup : Policies
  • OA Working Group
  • OASPA
  • Online Searcher
  • Open Access Bibliography
  • Open Access Week
  • Open and Shut?
  • Open Electronic Publishing
  • Open Folklore
  • Open Knowledge Maps
  • Open Library of Humanities
  • Periodiques en ligne (French)
  • Peter Murray Rust
  • PKP / OJS
  • Project Gutenberg
  • Publishing Archaeology
  • RBA Blog
  • Reclaim the Net
  • Research Information
  • Research Remix
  • Right to Research
  • River Valley TV
  • ROARS (Italian)
  • Scholarly Electronic Publishing
  • Scholarship Matters
  • Searchblox
  • Searcher
  • Serials Cataloger
  • Serials Review
  • Society of Young Publishers
  • Speech First
  • TaxoDiary (taxonomies news)
  • Taxpayer Access
  • Tentaclii
  • The Scholarly Kitchen
  • Thoughts from Carl Grant
  • Web Scale Discovery
  • Zotero blog

Some of the libraries linking to JURN

  • Boston College Libraries
  • Brooklyn Public Library, NY
  • Duke University
  • Kobe University, Japan
  • Rhode Island College
  • San Jose State University
  • UConn Stamford
  • University of California
  • University of Cambridge (Casimir Lewy Library)
  • University of Cambridge (main)
  • University of Canberra
  • University of Toronto
  • Washington University
  • West Virginia University

Spare BitCoins? Please send donations to JURN via: 17e2KGuyzjzEEE7BsoYTwMo3MtUod6DrjP

Archives

  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • June 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • News from JURN
    • Join 903 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • News from JURN
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...