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 researcher or academic these publications can still be useful to alert you to what’s likely coming in the future or how the technology or idea is being implemented. You can also learn the names of researchers and where the research is taking place. You can then often utilize the web to learn more about the reseacher and the organization their affiliated with.

Even if you don’t have the time to read the full text of the articles themselves, being able to scan the abstracts that are almost always provided for free can be helpful.

Using JournalTOCs: Nuts and Bolts

Although it’s not always necessary I suggest register for the service (free). Registered users have all of the publications they’re following backed-up on the JournalTOCS server and can also use the site to view material.

Discovering and finding finding publications to be notified about, and setting up alerts is straightforward. You can search (title or ISSN) or browse by publisher or subject.

As you spot titles you would like to follow, check (or tick) the box next to the title. Next to each title you’ll find a direct link to the publication’s home page and another link if you simply want to grab the RSS feed to add elsewhere.

All of your selections (of course they can be edited as needed) are listed on a personalized page that is accessed using the pulldown in the upper-right corner of the page. Just click on your login name.

From this page you can also save and export a complete list of followed journals as an OMPL feed to use in a newsreader app. This page also has a check box that toggles (off by default) a feature that will send alert notifications to the email address that you used when you registered for JournalTOCS.

Each table of contents alert is hyperlinked to either the abstract and bibliographic information and/or the full text of the article.

But Wait… There’s More

You can also use JournalTOCS to keyword search for bibliographic information (and in some cases full text) for each article listed in all alerts.

To do a keyword search of all articles in the database, select “for Articles by Keywords” radio button directly below the search box on the homepage. It’s worth mentioning that this a search of metadata and not of the full text.

Learn more about searching and browsing the database here.

New Journals Added

Although one of the founders of JournalTOCS, Roddy Macleod, is now retired from the Heriot-Watt University Library, he continues to work on the project and regularly adds new titles to the collection. As Roddy adds these titles to the database he posts updates on his personal blog. Here’s an example of a recent update.

By the way, JournalTOCS accepts suggestions about new journals to add to their database on this page. Publications must meet the following selection criteria:

• Scientific and scholarly journals that publish peer-reviewed research papers are covered.
• The journal must have an editor, an editorial board and a peer-review system.
• The journal must publish TOC RSS feeds for its most recent issues.

APIs? You Bet!

JournalTOCs has several free APIs available and many don’t require registration. Details here.

Final Comments

JournalTOCS is a very valuable service that also happens to be free. As we said at the outset even if you don’t normally ready scholarly publications, using JournalTOCS can let you take a few spare moments to quickly get an idea about projects, tools, and ideas that you might see sometime in the future. Plus, reading this type of material (sometimes the abstracts can be enough) might spark a new idea or fuel a discussion with friends and colleagues.

If you want to read the full text you might be able to find free versions (often preprints) of the articles on the Internet using services like Microsoft Academic Search, Google Scholar, SSRN, arXiv, and many others. In some cases, you might find a copy on the author’s personal homepage or the homepage for the organization their affiliated with.

If the final version of the articles (or preprints) are not on the open web, you might be able to access for free from a local public, academic, or special library. Many libraries offer access to many remotely accessible databases with full text articles available 24X7x365. We will talk how this works in an upcoming post.

Finally, a growing number of academic journals are now “open access” and the full text material articles are free for everyone to access and read.

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 filled with numbers?

Enter Zanran, a search engine built to uncover “semi-structured” data on the web:

This is the numerical data that people have presented as graphs and tables and charts. For example, the data could be a graph in a PDF report, or a table in an Excel spreadsheet, or a barchart shown as an image in an HTML page. This huge amount of information can be difficult to find using conventional search engines, which are focused primarily on finding text rather than graphs, tables and bar charts.

Or, as Zanran’s about us page declares, “Zanran is Google for data.”

That’s a pretty tall claim, especially for what co-founders Jon Goldhill and Yves Dassas describe as an “early beta” product. It begs an obvious question:

Is Zanran Any Good?

Short answer: For some queries, yes, Zanran is quite good. Almost scarily so, actually. But for other queries, it doesn’t yet measure up.

“As a general rule,” Goldhill says, “results are good when the data is likely to be found in graphs and tables rather than in free text, is the subject of a full analysis [and] serves information professionals (analysts, consultants, librarians, etc.).”

Good Results

One great example of Zanran’s capabilities is a search for average commute time.

The results are filled with PDFs that have matching data, and the first result on the page is data from the US Labor Department comparing commute times in 2000 versus 2007. My query didn’t include any geographical preference, and this top result focuses on the state of South Carolina — but it also has a graphic that compares South Caroline commute times to the US as a whole.

And Zanran has a nice feature that makes accessing the data faster: Putting your mouse over the icon at left shows a screenshot of what Zanran found to match your query. Here’s that US Labor Dept. page:

As I said, it’s mostly about South Carolina, but notice that the table at the bottom has US data, too.

Another strong result comes on a query like Facebook growth europe, which is obviously something that’s quantifiable via charts and graphs. Zanran’s results include a variety of PDFs and web pages with the data I’m looking for:

Not-so-good Results

One of the queries that doesn’t currently do well is the one I used at the beginning of this article. Searching Zanran for average age of us professors returns a lot of graphs and charts related to “professors” and “average,” but only a couple specifically offer age-related data.

Zanran offers a page showing examples of queries that tend to produce better results.

I should also mention that, in my initial testing, I didn’t use any of Zanran’s advanced search options. Those include the ability to search a specific site, for specific file types, over certain time periods (last 6 months, last 12 months, etc.) and for data from specific countries. The latter is available for certain English-language countries only.

Final Thoughts

Goldhill says that Zanran has already received good feedback “from information professionals who spend much of their day looking for serious information,” but he recognizes there’s room for improvement.

Right now, Zanran consists of Goldhill, Dassas, and a team of freelance programmers. They have what Goldhill calls a “friends and family” round of funding that will keep them going for at least another year. And there are plans to eventually monetize the search engine: Goldhill says they’ll place ads for relevant industry reports (think Gartner, Forrester, etc.) next to search results so that searchers can see what data is available for free and what’s available at a cost.

The jury’s still out on whether Zanran actually becomes a “Google for data,” but I’d say it’s off to a good start for now and there’s clearly an opportunity to develop a unique and useful niche search engine here.

Using Historical Views of the Web for SEO

The research and academic uses for historical views of the web are endless. But there are search engine optimization benefits as well. Did your shiny new domain used to host viagra spam and is thus on Google’s list of web sites that are naughty rather than nice? Google notes that this is one of the uses of its reconsideration request form: “if you recently purchased a domain that you think may have violated our guidelines before you owned it, you can use the reconsideration request form to let us know that you recently acquired the site and that it now adheres to the guidelines.”

Google’s Matt Cutts used the Wayback Machine during a site review panel at Pubcon in 2009, suggesting that site owners should review the history of domains they own or plan to purchase.

Some of the new features available in the new beta include a calendar view of the snapshots available and a sparklines-style trendline that lets you navigate through time.

See also:

• Of Permanent Value: Archiving the Web
• Factual: Parting the Curtains of the Invisible Web

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 frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers’ salaries, number of wildfires amongst others. Currently this data is coming from produced and published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division, but Google does hope to bring in more public data sources.

Why did Google announce this during the Wolfram Alpha Demo? Wolfram Alpha seems to be all about collecting these data sources and making it easy for people to search information on these types of data sources, complete with charts. The timing suggest Google was hoping to spoil what some see as a weakness it might have compared to Wolfram Alpha. I expect us to do more detailed piece on Wolfram|Alpha soon, so stay tuned.

Gary Price has also posted on the news and Google also posted a quick video demonstration:

Postscript: See Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine”, our review of the service and which also covers Google saying the timing of its structured data launch was entirely coincidental.

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 prepared this list of questions and answers below. Please keep reading if you would like more information about these changes to Encarta.

Clearly, Wikipedia is the dominating online encyclopedia these days. Of course, that leaves concern in the library community for accuracy of encyclopedia content. I am not an expert in this area, so hopefully we will bring on someone to write a more detailed analysis of this change.

This week, I am on a special trip known as the Blogger Delegation to Israel. We are being taken around by the Israeli Consulate to learn about Israel and the people who live here. Clearly, my focus is on search – so when I went to the Weizmann Institute today and met with extreme experts in the field of nanotechnology, alternative sustainable energy and even plant sciences, my main question was – what databases do you use for your research.

As I listened to information that was clearly way above my head, i.e. a new onion like molecule that when used in your car, it would never require an oil change again – I kept wondering, how can other scientists and researchers use this information to help their studies. How can researchers quickly pull up data, with citations, to find information at their finger tips.

So when I spoke with Professor David Cahen, he told me about his meetings with Google and trying to convince them to build out a search engine that does just that. In fact, he is on a personal crusade to educate the average person out there that much of the information out there on the web is either wrong or can be used wrong. His dream search engine would return accurate information, with citations listed, to your questions on how much energy does it consume to burn a certain amount of oil. Google is on their way to showing information on energy topics, such as their Power Meter that is designed to educate consumers about their power consumption. The issue is, according to Profession Cahen, it isn’t always accurate.

Cahen’s issue, in my opinion, is that Google cannot possible allocate their resources to building out a specialty database for this cause. If the Professor can use tools such as Yahoo’s BOSS platform and feed the data to BOSS, it might work well for his purpose. The main issue is that the professor does not have the time and resources to collect and feed this data to a search engine.

I was incredibly impressed with the work Ron Milo did with BioNumbers. Ron Milo is actually building a community of researchers, who add and edit (almost in Wiki style) to his specialty database. Milo’s main issue is getting his “pet project” out there to his community. What came to mind immediately was Google Coop’s Topics program. I cannot tell you how frustrated I was to hear that Ron Milo never heard of it. Why do I say that? Because Ron Milo is the exact person Google wants to use this service. Ron has built a structured data set that can easily be added to this Google project and might build out more awareness of BioNumbers.

Why is awareness of BioNumbers important to search? Google, no matter how good I find it to be, still has issues accessing structure data. Google Coop was one of Google’s answers, as is Google Base, Google Blog Search and so on. Yahoo BOSS or Search Monkey is another answer to these questions. BioNumbers can be expanded into other verticals, such as ChemiNumbers or GeoNumbers and so on. Getting experts to contribute to these specialty databases and Google and Yahoo educating these researchers on the tools they have to help build awareness of the answers the databases have, is incredibly important to furthering all sciences. Bridging the two, is a win-win for both the search engine and the researchers.

Here is a short video demonstrating some of the answers BioNumbers gives searchers:

The only issue is, resources – and who can the search engine serve best with those resources. The average consumer or the researchers? In this case, researchers need to build these data sets and feed them to a search engine. Search engines need to better educate these types of organizations about the tools they have that can unlock the data these researchers seek.

Yes, it’s a busy life but I’m very fortunate to do what I love and even get paid for it. The challenge, as least as I see it, is writing on something of interest for Search Engine Land and not worrying about conflicts of interest with every sentence I write.

Good news: I have found a topic that not only interests me but grows in significance for all of us as each day and each version of a web page passes: The importance of making web content more permanent. It’s crucial for historical purposes for web content to become less ephemeral.

It’s my goal in this series of articles to keep you posted on some of the major web archiving initiatives, databases, research and services, while at the same time offering quick peeks at tools you can use to save web pages and other forms of electronic content on your own. Naturally, awareness of copyright is key.

There is a lot going on all over the world and I will do my best to offer you introductions to many digital preservation initiatives, along with the research from universities and organizations engaged in collecting and storing online content.

So, where do we begin?

Many people know about The Internet Archive, based at the Presidio in San Francisco and home to The Wayback Machine. But many people aren’t aware of numerous additional projects (archiving, digitizing, preservation) that the Internet Archive, under the leadership of Brewster Kahle, is involved in.

One is a service the Internet Archive offers for a growing number of institutional clients, named Archive-It.

In a nutshell, this subscription service allows an organization to use an application that includes crawling, recrawling and data hosting services.

From the web site:

Internet Archive’s subscription service, Archive-It, allows institutions to build, manage and search their own web archive through a user friendly web application, without requiring any technical expertise or hosting facilities.

Subscribers can capture, catalog, and archive their institution’s own web site or build collections from the web, and then search and browse the collection when complete.

The collections are then made public (unless a user decides to keep them private) via the Archive-It web site. At last count, Archive-It was permanently archiving more than 135 million pages in nearly 300 collections.

For those interested, Archive-It regularly offers webinars explaining their services.

This page offers direct links to all of Archive-It collections. In recent weeks, the collection has seen many new collections added to the service

A few of the most interesting collections include:

• Tragedy at Virginia Tech A collection of web pages from the University and elsewhere immediately following the tragedy.
• California High Speed Rail Authority
• Orange County California Web Sites
• Latin American Government Documents Archive, (University of Texas)
• Canadian Political Parties and Political Interest Groups

It’s also worth noting that unlike the tens of millions of archived pages accessible via The Wayback Machine which cannot be keyword searched, pages archived using the Archive-It service can be searched using keywords.

In an upcoming article I will take a look at two massive web archives that combine the best of both the National Archives of the United States and The Internet Archive. They are named Web Harvest Presidential Term 2004 and Web Harvest 109th Congress (2006). Between them they contain terabytes of archived U.S. Government web data.

Gary Price is Director of Online Information Resources for Ask.com and also editor of ResourceShelf and DocuTicker. The Search On Search column, written by employees of major search engines, appears periodically at Search Engine Land.

He explored several science search tools including Scirus, Live Search Academic, Google Scholar, Scitopia, Global Science Gateway and others.

The search options are fairly limited – to geographic areas of the world, themes (such as art, politics, science and so on), with the option of further limiting to specific sites such as the British Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston and so on. The searcher then pops into the search box the year they are interested in and TimeSearch responds with a timeline starting at that date and extending for about a year.

Entries are brief, but can be expanded to a more helpful paragraph. There are two sets of icons, one either side of the specific event which link to sites and images.

I quickly discovered that it makes sense to expand the results since the one line notation of events wasn’t always helpful. I would also have preferred more dating information. Oddly for a search engine that is emphasizing time, searchers only get the year that an event happened, nothing more specific; it’s necessary to click on a link and hope, and this is a very poor oversight by the designers.

There is a second search box which is for subject searching, but this merely takes the user to Google, Answers, the Wikipedia and so on and leaves them to their own devices from that point on.

This is probably the most annoying drawback of the system – while it is all well and good to be able to search a specific period of time, this search engine does not help if I need to discover when the American Civil War started for example. Once I know that it’s 1861, I can get a lot of useful information, but if I don’t know that at the outset, I’m stuck.

Other than that, it’s certainly an interesting search engine and one that I could see being widely used within the education system. A little more development could turn this from a good search engine into a great one, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it in the hope it does just that.