25 Tuesday Jun 2019
Mindshare UK’s The Future of Search (full report, free in public PDF) for those who use smartphones in the UK…
we tracked people’s search behaviour using ethnography, face-to-face workshops and neuroscience experiments surveying 1,800 UK smartphone users.
11 Monday Mar 2019
Access to academic libraries: an indicator of openness? (March 2019)…
academic library policies can place restrictions on public access to [such] libraries. […] This paper reports on a preliminary study [and finds that] physical entry and access to print and electronic resources in academic libraries is contracting. […] Most affected is the general, unaffiliated public.
initial sample for the study was fourteen medium to large research universities in Australia, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States.
18 Monday Feb 2019
Qresp, an open source tool for the automated collection, bundling and distribution of all supporting data and data-sets for a journal paper. Apparently it also auto-adds the required metadata and public discovery enhancements.
12 Tuesday Feb 2019
The new OOIR List. Currently with 849 journals in its List, these being from Web of Science’s SSCI journals in social studies. 119 of the titles on the OOIR List are flagged as Open Access, though a good number of these are greyed-out and not tracked (because they don’t bother to also submit to CrossRef).
Evidently Web of Science only covers 119 such OA titles, which means its OA coverage in this area has hardly budged since 2015 when Web of Science was only showing 116 titles in OA in social studies.
Within that very limited range, what OOIR is trying to do with its titles seems interesting, by providing an aggregated ‘latest’ / ‘trending’ / ‘active journals’ dashboard. It’s neatly presented, and there are also per-journal metrics over on the Statistics tab.
Apparently the service is focussed on recent papers, and “OOIR does not link to papers published before Nov 2018”. A previous RSS-feed based version, for politics and diplomacy, was titled Observatory of International Relations (OIR). But this has now been shut in favour of OOIR.
I guess the question now is, would it be possible to build something bigger and similar and slightly shinier, that could provide a public tracking-dashboard for all such material of use to those interested in timely new research on politics, diplomacy and related matters? Zak Kallenborn has some ideas on that in his recent article “Academic Paywalls Harm National Security”.
07 Thursday Feb 2019
“Repository optimisation & techniques to improve discoverability and web impact: an evaluation” (2018)…
provides persuasive evidence that specific enhancements to technical aspects of a repository can result in significant improvements to repository visibility […] traffic to Strathprints from Google and Google Scholar was found to increase by 63% and 99% respectively.
15 Thursday Nov 2018
Another new prodding of Google Scholar, this time from the latest First Monday “Testing Google Scholar bibliographic data: Estimating error rates for Google Scholar citation parsing”…
While data quality is good for journal articles and conference proceedings, books and edited collections are often wrongly described or have incomplete data. We identify a particular problem with material from online repositories [where there appears to be] considerable inhomogeneity in the implementation of data standards [and] a mismatch between repository software and the harvesting protocols employed by Google Scholar.
One of Scholar’s other problems is that it includes Google Books results. While 30% of the time its Google Books inclusions can useful, there is no way to exclude Books results. One might want to exclude because Scholar still can’t seem to determine a proper book from a robot-produced shovelware ebook that assembles public-domain content. Scholar has no ‘edition authority’ which states that the Joshi-edited and annotated Penguin Classics edition of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Dexter Ward” is the gold-standard and that it has a text that has been fully corrected of the many textual errors, omissions and editing mistakes of previous decades. Unlike the public-domain shovelware ebooks that flood Amazon and (often) Google Books.
A basic undergraduate level search, for instance, for Lovecraft “Dexter Ward”, demonstrates the problem on the first page. Joshi is nowhere to be seen, and the searcher is hammered by links to shovelware ebooks (or worse), often with citation counts that suggest they are legitimate.
05 Monday Nov 2018
For those who know what they’re looking for, and how to type… here’s how to block the dumb auto-suggestions from appearing on the Google Scholar search-box:
1. In the UBlock Origin Web browser addon, open the My Filters list (Go: Icon | Slider Controls Icon | My filters tab).
2. Paste in the line…
google.*##[class^="gs_md_"]
3. Save the List and exit it. Reload Google Scholar, and the flickery and distracting (and almost always very wrong) drop-down suggestions are gone.
A variant of the above ‘block line’ with probably also work in similarly advanced ad-blocker addons.
16 Thursday Aug 2018
A new preprint on arxiv.org, “Google Scholar, Web Of Science, and Scopus: A Systematic Comparison of Citations in 252 Subject Categories”.
Google Scholar’s… “citation data is essentially a superset of WoS and Scopus, with substantial extra coverage.” This is partly because “Google Scholar is able to pick up citations… “from non-journal sources … including theses, books, conference papers, and unpublished materials … Many were non-English (19%-38%), and they tended to be much less cited than citing sources that were also in Scopus or WoS.”
However, there are also warnings in the conclusions section, especially that in Google Scholar… “some of the citations [come] from Master’s theses”. Also note that Google Scholar’s citation counts were found to be “lower in the Humanities”.
21 Monday May 2018
New from MIT Press and under CC, Shadow Libraries: Access to Educational Materials in Global Higher Education (PDF). Also available in paperback via Amazon etc. Surveys the evolution of the trend that has today become Sci-Hub, Libgen.io etc.
22 Saturday Jul 2017
“An Evidence-Based Review of Academic Web Search Engines, 2014-2016”… “This article seeks to summarize research concerning Google Scholar, Google Books, and Microsoft Academic from the past three years”.
Useful. Interesting snippets from this excellent new summary survey:
* Weiss noted, “no critical studies seem to exist on the effect that Google Books might have on the contemporary reference experience” (Weiss 2016, 293). […] Research is badly needed about the coverage and utility of both Google Books and Microsoft Academic.”
Seriously? None, not one single study from 2005-2015? For one of the most important innovations in books since Gutenberg? Wow. That’s one hell of a grudge you’re holding there, librarians.
* “In September 2016, Hug et al. […] noted Microsoft Academic has “grown massively from 83 million publication records in 2015 to 140 million in 2016″ […] As of February 2017 its index contains 120 million citations.”
Great news, which means I’ll have to take another look at that. I’m overdue for doing another big ‘group test’ of OA coverage in public search-engines, so this news may spur that. Of course, “citations” are not full-text, but 120m is impressive.
* “Bonato [2016] noted Google Scholar retrieved different results with Advanced and Basic searches”
So that’s another thing to take into account if I do another group-test this summer.
* A “glaring lack of research related to the [search] coverage of arts and humanities scholarship” [and specifically] “Little is known about coverage of arts and humanities by Google Scholar.” [and it is evident that arts and humanities scholars’] preferences and behavior […] cannot be inferred from the vast literature focused on the sciences.”
* “research concerning the use of academic web search engines by undergraduates, community college students, high school students, and other groups would be welcome.”
* “Scholar results have been said to contain “clutter””.
This is the closest the paper comes to mentioning all the predatory journals and similar dubious items, which get dragged into Scholar by automated collection bots.
* “During interviews of 20 historians by Martin and Quan-Haase (2016) concerning serendipity, five mentioned Google Books and Google Scholar as important for recreating serendipity of the physical library online.”
Yes, serendipity is vital. It’s more of a loosely chain-linked set of serendipity loops during search-based research, really, interspersed with deep-dives to get tiny confirming nuggets of fact (e.g.: was Borges correct when he suggested that The Time Machine‘s famous central motif of ‘the future-flower’ was almost certainly not influenced by a striking passage in Coleridge’s notebooks? Yes he was, presumably by a private letter of enquiry to some learned bibliophile in London. But he was characteristically recondite on this point in the essay, and thus can only be proved correct if you do the 30 minute deep-dive to the primary sources needed to get the exact month-of-publication dates in 1895).
* “arts and humanities scholars […] commonly expressed the belief that having a complete list of research activities online improves public awareness [with] the enormous potential for this tool’s use.”
Might be more useful to have a rolling listing of what’s not being done, but which needs to be done. Sort of like a speculative Kickstarter, only you’d gather people rather than cash.
* “Gardner (2016) showed […] people working in the humanities and religion and theology prefer to use Google”. “Humanities scholar use of Google over Google Scholar was also found by Kemman et al. (2013); Google, Google Images, Google Scholar, and YouTube were used more than JSTOR or other library databases”
* “Namei and Young’s [2015] comparison of Summon, Google Scholar, and Google using 299 known-item queries. They found Google Scholar and Summon returned relevant results 74% of the time; Google returned relevant results 91% of the time.”
* “In Yang’s (2016) study of Texas Tech’s DSpace IR [the university repository], Google was the only search engine that indexed, discovered, or linked to PDF files supplemented with metadata; Google Scholar did not discover or provide links to the IR’s PDF files, and was less successful at discovering metadata.”
I’m guessing this possibly illustrates the value of separating a university’s big dumpy Digital Collections from the nimble research repository, by putting them on different domains? Texas Tech’s DSpace has them both cheek-by-jowl, and adds a Law repository for good measure.
* “IR platform and metadata schema dramatically affect discovery, with some IRs nearly invisible (Weideman 2015; Chen 2014; Orduña-Malea and López-Cózar 2015; Yang 2016) and others somewhat findable by Google Scholar (Lee et al. 2015; Obrien et al. 2016).”
* “Another area needing investigation is the visibility of links to free full text in Google Scholar.” [and more generally] “retrieval of full text, which is another area ripe for more research studies, especially in light of the impressive quantity of full text that can be retrieved without user authentication.” […] “When will academic users find a good-enough selection of full-text articles that they no longer need the expanded full text paid for by their institutions?”
Indeed.
There are also good formulations of four future-research questions specific to the arts and humanities (pages 27-28).
