JournalTOCS, sponsored by Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh Scotland, is a free service that has been online for many years and provides alerts for more than 17,000 journals published by more than 900 publishers and organizations. Almost 3,000 of these publications are open access so the full text is quickly and directly accessible on the web for free. For many years, professionals, academics, students and others have used services that alerted them when new issues of scholarly/academic (peer-reviewed) publications were published or about to be published. If you’re not a research [...]

Related Topics: Features: Analysis | Search Engines: Academic Search Engines

A few days ago, I was looking for a very specific piece of data: the average age of professors in the US. I did a Google search for "average age of us professors" and, after the obligatory and unhelpful Wikipedia result at the top, found some data that was good enough further down the search results. Google (and other search engines) does pretty well with some data-based searches, especially since many of us have trained ourselves how to phrase a query to get the info we want. But what about when the data we want isn't found in text, but is likely to be found in graphs, charts and tables [...]

Related Topics: Features: General | Search Engines: Academic Search Engines | Search Engines: Other Search Engines

The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 to "build an internet library" and offers a searchable collection of digital collections. Internet Achive's Wayback Machine (launched in 2001) has archived web pages going back to 1996, enabling historical snapshots of the web. As ReadWriteWeb notes, the Wayback Machine has just been redesigned and relaunched with a nicer user interface, and more importantly, has been migrated to a new platform as a foundation for further improvements. (The new beta has been launched under a new domain: waybackmachine.org; the original version is still available at arch [...]

Related Topics: Search Engines: Academic Search Engines | Top News

During the Wolfram Alpha demonstration today, the Google Blog announced the launch of their own structured data search feature that allows you to find and compare public data. Searches such as [unemployment rate new york] will now bring up a quick answer that looks like this: Clicking on the result will take you to a more detailed graph with ways to plot other data on this charge. Below is me plotting Rockland County, New York, compared to New York State and also adding California: Google promises to add public data for answers on prices of cookies, CO2 emissions, asthma frequenc [...]

Related Topics: Google: OneBox, Plus Box & Direct Answers | Search Engines: Academic Search Engines | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Wolfram Alpha | Top News

Ars Technica reports that Microsoft has decided to discontinue their encyclopedia software, Encarta. Both the MSN Encarta reference Web sites as well as its Encarta software will be shut down. Microsoft said: On October 31, 2009, MSN® Encarta® Web sites worldwide will be discontinued, with the exception of Encarta Japan, which will be discontinued on December 31, 2009. Additionally, Microsoft will cease to sell Microsoft Student and Encarta Premium software products worldwide by June 2009. We understand that Encarta users may have questions regarding this announcement so we have prepare [...]

Related Topics: Search Engines: Academic Search Engines | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Wikipedia