ArchbotLit

ArchbotLit is a new searchable database for “literature on archaeological remains of cultivated plants since 1981”. For those dashing in to do a quick test of ArchbotLit, the search-box is not immediately obvious. I had results via the tiny box up at the top-right of the page…

Dead Carrot

The Carrot2 search-engine appears to be kaput. It’s been down for days now, unable to show results. Multiple different browers, on different systems, even different VPNs, give no results. A query can be input, but… no results. Even a TOR browser can’t get it to respond. Such a pity, it was so promising.

The new PubMed

JURN’s indexing has been updated, re: the New PubMed.

The new PubMed will become the default in spring 2020 and will ultimately replace the legacy version.

Carrot2 search – a new script for multi-column results

The Carrot2 search-engine has changed both URL and layout. It was at search.carrot2.org/stable/search and it’s now just at the search.carrot2.org URL. I guess the public-facing search may have come out of beta? This is what their new layout looks like…

Not good, on a widescreen desktop monitor.

Which means I’ve made another custom CSS for it. This slices the Carrot into a multi-column layout suited to a widescreen 1920px monitor. It works in the Stylus browser addon, and you need to tell the script to target the search.carrot2.org site

Yum, crunchy Carrot! All the z-depths are set up nicely, so you can still click on/in the filters and search box.

I like to read the URLs in search-results and so I’ve turned them dark green and wrapped them to make this possible. The results look good with URLs that line-wrap by up to three lines. But it’s unavoidable that some very long URLs will wrap over four lines, and will thus spill over the element below.

In most cases there should be no need for any scrolling.

It only works in Day mode, with the Carrot’s new toggle-able Night and Day mode…

If you want a night mode, you’ll have to manually change the colour chips to a charcoal black on…

body, body.light {

and

div.ResultList

The other drawback is that whereas the old multi-column fix showed about 25-30 results, now we’re down to about 16. If you want it up to 20+ add the following code…


.ResultClusters {
display: none;
}


There’s also the lack of a “more…” button, but this usefully forces the user to use the Carrot’s innovative faceting systems over in the left-hand pane.

---

To install my fix, simply go to Carrot2, then left-click on your icon for the Stylus browser addon and click “Write style for…”.

Then paste in this…


/* ==== CARROT2 - Multi-Columns v.02 Oct 2019 ==== */
/* run this Stylus script on search.carrot2.org */
div.document div.url {
overflow: hidden;
color: #3a7730;
font-size: 110%;
}
body, body.light {
background-color: #ece5db;
}
.ResultList > div > a > span.url {
color: #3f7126;
font-size: 80%;
font-weight: bold;
white-space: pre; /* CSS 2.0 */
white-space: pre-wrap; /* CSS 2.1 */
white-space: pre-line; /* CSS 3.0 */
white-space: -pre-wrap; /* Opera 4-6 */
white-space: -o-pre-wrap; /* Opera 7 */
white-space: -moz-pre-wrap; /* Mozilla */
white-space: -hp-pre-wrap; /* HP Printers */
word-wrap: break-word; /* IE 5+ */
}
a {
font-size: 100%;
}
.SearchForm {
z-index:20;
}
div.ResultList {
z-index:4;
position:absolute;
background-color: #ece5db;
padding-top: 180px;
top:0;
bottom:0;
right:0;
column-count: 5;
width: 70%
}
.ResultList > div > a >div {
font-size: 80%;
}
div.sources {
padding-top: 25px;
}
div.ClusterList {
background-color: #ece5db;
padding-top: 10px;
column-count: 2;
}
div.clusters-tabs {
width: 40%
}
div.clusters {
z-index:4;
width: 50%
}


Tested in Opera, which is a browser that runs on Chrome. It will probably work with other CSS style injectors.

Be warned that Carrot2 will perma-block an entire IP address (in the case of BT in the UK, or VPNs, that can mean hundreds of thousands of users) if it detects “excessive traffic”.

Mind the Gap

MIT’s Mind the Gap is a new comprehensive survey report on open source publishing systems that can be used for scholarly purposes. The only one I can see that’s missing is WordPress. Which is open source, free, easy to use and rent a server for, and can be quickly tooled-up with plugins for such purposes. In fact, it’s not even mentioned once, even to explain why it and its plugins were omitted.

How to: Google Search in columns at Summer 2019

There’s now a temporary sort-of fix for the badly broken GoogleMonkeyR browser userscript, the fix being kindly made by IzzySoft. My thanks to IzzySoft, but it still has numerous problems and also doesn’t work at all with News results. One of the worst problems is that results can get ‘sliced’ across columns, with one bit of a result at the foot of column one, and the other bit at the top of column two. It also doesn’t work well with Google Hit Hider by Domain.

For now then, I suggest that someone wanting three-column Google Search and Google Books, on a widescreen desktop PC, should abandon GoogleMonkeyR. Instead try the following, to get Google Search looking like this…

1. Disable any installs of GoogleMonkeyR.

2. Get the Stylus extension. This is a host that enables quick makeovers of the style of a website, via simple style scripts.

3. Then install the Stylus style “Google Search in columns”, after first setting “3” columns in the download options. I could not get four columns to look or feel good.

4. I tried some Google Search makeover Styles, but none could colour the link title and URL separately. I’ve learned to instantly ‘read the URLs’ over the years, and thus want them clearly identifiable at the merest glance. For a fully configurable colours makeover I went to the Dark Theme for Google Chrome addon, which can do such things and which seems robust and updated.

5. Tweak the colours in this Dark Theme addon. It’s fully configurable, inc. in my Opera browser, and you access its options via right-clicking its icon.

This gives you easy ways to set the colours, and you can even set a timer so the dark mode only kicks in at dusk and turns off at dawn.

There’s also a custom .CSS injector which looks interesting, and I’ll tinker with it at some point.

6. Now you want to tell Google to deliver only 9 results per page, by using an access URL with a command embedded in it that limits the number of results. 9 results suits a three column layout, and (once you get rid of other clutter), means you usually don’t have to scroll down to find the “next page” controls.

https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&complete=0&tbo=1&num=9&tbs=li:1

num=9 is what’s switching you from 10 to 9 results.

7. Finally you use the popular UBlock addon and its Element Picker to perma-block page clutter, as it appears in the Google Search results to mess up your layout. Such as huge slabs of video suggestions, instant answers, and other distracting and often irrelevant auto-fluff. There’s a bit of an art to such blocking, but you’ll get the hang of it. Just keep at it until all you’re getting is what you want — just the actual search results.

8. Here’s what my Google Search looks like on a desktop PC, with this setup.

Google Search. Everything ‘at a glance’, suited to a desktop widescreen, and with all URLs and controls clearly visible. Only the Google Books switch-through link is behind a dropdown menu, but at some point I’ll find a fix to replace “Shopping” with “Books” on the menu.

Google Books.

Nothing seems to budge Google News, in terms of getting results into columns, unfortunately. GoogleMonkeyR used to do that, but it no longer works and the new fix doesn’t do it. Nothing else seems to work on it.

As you’ll see above I use the UserScript “Google Search Sidebar” to get the neat sidebar, JURN in a UserScript to inject a quick search-query passing link into the Google menu. I also use uBlock to block the distracting book-cover thumbnails on Google Books.

I also run Google HitHider by Domain. Which in some cases means results look like this…

The spaces are results from blocked domains, being elegant replaced with a blank block where the result would have appeared, and thus not spoiling the layout.

A new thesis partly on OA and Google Scholar

Generacion de herramientas de evaluacion bibliometrica a partir de Google Scholar, a newly public thesis for the Universidad de Granada, 2019. The focus appears to be on data obtained in 2014.

* Chapter 9. Journal Scholar Metrics: building an Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences journal ranking with Google Scholar data.

* Chapter 16. Evidence of Open Access of scientific publications in Google Scholar: a large-scale analysis.

OA journals in the Nordic countries

Open access journal publishing in the Nordic countries, Learned Publishing, March 2019.

There have been no previous comprehensive studies about OA journals in the Nordic countries.” [using a good variety of sources] “437 scholarly OA journals published in the five Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) were identified, and some key characteristics were studied. Of these, only 184 were indexed in DOAJ. Social sciences and humanities dominated as topics, and few journals charge authors.

The Future of Search

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.

LibGen Desktop catalogue

Want to know what’s in the LibGen catalogue? There’s now a Desktop software version of the catalogue…

have your own offline copy of the LG catalog!