On ResearchGate

What publishers can take away from the latest early career researcher research ($), a five-page “Industry Update” for the journal Learned Publishing, 28th April 2018…

“ResearchGate is unquestionably the scholarly elephant in the room, which despite being just 10 years old boasts 15 million research members and is still growing at a rate of knots. … publisher offerings can look monastic and parochial by comparison. […] It looks rather like the new scholarly world order.” […] “Much depends on whether ECRs [early-career-researchers] take their millennial beliefs in sharing, openness, and transparency into leadership positions. [and if] publishers [start] feeding ResearchGate rather than competing with it – [making it] a publishing Amazon”.

The Update is by the team doing an industry-supported three-year cohort study of search and similar practices. Their first two reports are Early Career Researchers: the harbingers of change? Year One 2016 and now also the Year Two 2017 report, both free and public at the same website. Apparently the cohort of around 100+ is all science and social studies.

Also fairly new, and related, “ResearchGate and Academia.edu as networked socio-technical systems for scholarly communication: a literature review” (OA), in the Research in Learning Technology journal, 20th February 2018…

“a thorough understanding is still lacking of how these sites operate as networked socio-technical systems reshaping scholarly practices and academic identity. This article analyses 39 empirical studies published in peer-reviewed journals with a specific focus on ResearchGate and Academia.edu.”

Google Search currently suggests circa 72-million full-text PDFs at ResearchGate, although given the above Industry Update statement on ‘the 15m members’ we can probably assume some 10m of those PDFs are just CVs (which are nearly all excluded from JURN, by the way). Remove other fluff and I guess there might be circa 50m proper papers there. It would then be interesting to work out what “the uniques” are, by removing the papers freely available elsewhere in repositories and OA journals and suchlike. I’d very roughly guess that including ResearchGate PDFs in JURN may bring in some 5m to 8m papers not found elsewhere.

Advertisements

NOA : Scientific Image Search

NOA : Scientific Image Search. A project currently indexing 2.7 million free-to-use scientific images, extracted from CC-BY sources along with metadata and links. As you’d expect, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov dominates the URL links. I searched for European Lynx and had good results (big kitties), though nothing high-res.

The extracted images and their data are also being copied over to Wikimedia, where Google Images will pick them up after a while — and offer high-res filters.

Incidentally, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov has its own public and official Open-i Biomedical Image Search Engine. A search for European Lynx shows it is indeed strictly biomedical.

Searching for Recent Anthropology and Archaeology Publications

“Searching for Recent Anthropology and Archaeology Publications”, a frank new paper in the ANSS Currents (Anthropology Section of the American Library Assoc.) Spring 2018 issue. The authors examined the apparently rather severe shortcomings of commercial anthropology databases such as Anthropology Plus (EBSCO), when used to try to find recent 2013-2017 faculty papers/chapters needed to support undergraduate essay research.

While Berkeley anthropologists are prolific and well-known, their works remain hidden even in a systematic search.

Google’s Talk to Books

Talk to Books is a new Google service that tries to show book snippets directly relevant to your well-formulated query question.

I rather unfairly tried it with a fiendish question: When did J.R.R. Tolkien discover the word earendel? (without quote marks). None of the results were accurate, in contrast to Google Books where the top three results were accurate / useful / authoritative, as was the seventh result. Not only that, but the snippets were also more or less spot on.

It’s a tricky question, not only because lower-case earendel is Anglo-Saxon. There’s that use, and then there’s also the capitalised name Eärendil. Which is the name of the character Tolkien developed, after being inspired by the Anglo-Saxon word and its very complex clusters of meanings and associations. The other problem is that no-one knows exactly when in the first half of 1913 he found the word, and exactly where he found it — in a dictionary, a commentary or a footnote, or was he told about it by a tutor at Exeter College (he was having personal tuition with some of the great names in word-lore), or was his first encounter with the word while actually reading Crist in Old English? The word is the key root-hole for his work, from which the seed of his great legendarium later arose.

So, kudos to Google Books for getting it right in a useful way. Google’s Talk to Books on the other hand seems to have semantically smushed the words and ignored earendel. The name-authority was accurate, but it seemed to assume I just wanted something about Tolkien and his use of words in general, and tried a scattergun approach…

1. His fictional use of dwarf-names in the Icelandic Dvergatal (‘Dwarf table’), found in the Voluspa.
2. His early work on writing entries for the Oxford English Dictionary.
2. His mid-career attitude to the Celtic languages.
4. His entry for “Walrus” in the Oxford English Dictionary.
5. His early and reluctant abandonment of the worn-out word ‘fairy’ in his early poetry and invented-languages, in favour of ‘elf’.

There was no connection made between earendel and Eärendil, which suggests that perhaps Talk to Books might usefully add a semantic sub-system devoted to character-names, and their variants and mis-spellings?

‘Discoverability of award-winning undergraduate research in history’

New paper: “The discoverability of award-winning undergraduate research in history: Implications for academic libraries”, College & Undergraduate Libraries, April 2018…

“eight of the fifteen papers could be found in full text. If full text was available somewhere, Google always found it. Google Scholar only found four of the eight full-text papers […] Microsoft Academic found two of the full-text papers”

Lens.org

Lens Scholarly Search, a new tool to search across patents and citations at the cutting-edge of innovative science and engineering. Looks great, with nice clean design and fast response. It’s one of the new wave of citation search tools.

It’s public, and can be used without an account sign-in, unlike Sparrho (which claims 60m across both citations and patents).

I can’t see any way to filter the search results for “… and has link to free public full-text”. But I guess if you need a focussed tool like this, then your innovative project has the funding to access everything that you need to read.

Searches can be embedded in URLs, as can the ‘search by date’ setting. Which means that saving a set of bookmarks would give you a usefully quick way of regularly horizon-scanning across the developed applications and commercialisation of a specific research topic. I don’t see that Lens.org has the capability to offer a RSS alerts-type feed, based on keywords, though it looks like it may do if you sign up for an account. Of course, on highly sensitive projects, such an account has dangers — in that you don’t know if competitor nations might be sniffing at or profiling your search-trail in some way.

New book: Harnessing the Power of Google

I see that I missed the publication of a new book about Google Search. Harnessing the Power of Google: What Every Researcher Should Know was released in summer 2017, when I wasn’t paying much attention to news. It’s a short primer of 150 pages and the contents list looks very encouraging. These contents seem to chime with a blog review and an Amazon review, which both suggest the book is aimed at… “librarians who will be working with researchers”. Implying researchers of the type who will expect to be working with expert Google users rather than Google-phobics.

It’s possible to peer inside the book via Google Books. Sadly this shows that the book doesn’t mention the rich possibilities of Google Custom Search, as a keyword search of the text shows no results for either “custom search” or “CSE”.

It appears that the book has yet to receive any open/public reviews from librarians. But the business researcher blog Infonista has a polished and informative review.

“Access to Freely Available Journal Articles” (2017)

Access to Freely Available Journal Articles: Gold, Green, and Rogue Open Access across the Disciplines (2016 conference presentation script/summary, published 2017)…

“We randomly selected 300 articles that were indexed in Scopus and published in 2015. A hundred of them are from the arts and humanities, and a hundred of them are from the social sciences, and a hundred are from the life sciences, and all of them, again, randomly selected.”

These 300 appear to have been a random mix of paywall and OA and were then searched for on Google, Google Scholar, Researchgate, and Sci-Hub. The researchers were simply looking for free public copies of the articles, wherever they could be found.

The methodology used is slightly fuzzily explained…

“We just did a title search. We didn’t do anything further than the title search”.

Fuzzy, because a Google “full-title” known-title search “as a phrase” is not the safest way to go about such a test. Due to the way Google Search works, ideally one would want to search on the first 50 characters of the title instead of on the entirety of a long academic article-title.

Also, Scopus is poor at indexing Open Access, only managing 29.18% coverage of the DOAJ Open Access titles even in 2017. And the Scopus spreadsheet, now sortable by OA status, indicates Scopus has very poor coverage of OA arts and humanities titles. So 100 arts and humanities articles from Scopus is not a great starting point, even if suitably randomised. The sample will likely skew heavily toward paywall articles.

Anyway, even with these limitations the results for public full-text free-access were somewhat interesting. From left to right, just for the 100 Arts & Humanities articles: Google Scholar, Google Search, Researchgate, and Sci-Hub (prior to its recent problems)…

Sci-Hub was known to have severe problems accessing things like recent Project MUSE articles, so perhaps glitches like that prevented an even higher result than 86%.

More GRAFT

GRAFT has updated with new additions to the URLs indexed. Now searching across full-text and records alike, in 4,569 repositories.

Massive Bronze figure unearthed

“The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles” (Feb 2018, PeerJ)…

“the most common mechanism for OA is not Gold, Green, or Hybrid OA, but rather an under-discussed category we dub Bronze: articles made free-to-read on the publisher website, without an explicit Open license.”

Of Bronze, “few studies have highlighted its role” [in OA]. “We manually inspected a small sample of Bronze articles in order to understand this subcategory more; we found that while many Bronze articles were Delayed OA from toll-access publishers, nearly half were hosted on journals that published 100% of content as free-to-read but were not listed on the DOAJ and did not formally license content (using CC-BY or any other license).”

Bronze was found to be at a whopping 47% of OA, from a one-week sample of Unpaywall-DOIs in 2017.