Some implications of "digital" for scholarly writing and publishing

Category: Content discovery Page 1 of 2

How to find seminal papers

Reading Time: 4 minutes
Photo by Hansjörg Keller on Unsplash

We can all agree that a lot of research, perhaps most research, starts with asking questions. Does smoking cause cancer? What are the causes of the French Revolution? What causes inflation? The next step is …

Will Octopus transform scholarly communication?

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Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

Octopus is a new platform for scholarly research: somewhat like a preprint server, with instant publication, but Instead of a full article, a researcher posts just a component of an article: a problem statement, …

Is discovery the researcher’s dream?

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A 16th-century illustration of Archimedes in his bath – not clear whether this is before or after his great discovery (public domain)

A special issue of UKSG Insights on discovery (Discovery is the Researcher’s Dream)  sounded promising, but it …

Adding links automatically

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Examples of links to topic pages from articles on Science Direct – see, for example, “fullerenes”.

Should you add functionality just because you can? Here is an example of why perhaps you should not. Todd Carpenter has written an excellent post

Is Google better for research than Google Scholar?

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Figure 1: Search on Google for “academic resources searching”

Sometimes an academic article delivers results that are so much at odds with your common sense that you immediately try to see holes in the argument.

Take, for example, an article in …

Why concept maps may not be such a good idea

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EBSCO Concept Map

I don’t have access to the EBSCO Discovery Service, but above is an example screenshot provided by EBSCO as an example. A concept map (or knowledge graph) is just a visual collection of links. Sometimes, as here, there …

How Academics discover new content

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Cover of the 2021 edition

Imagine you are a researcher, studying, say, bird migration. How do you find out about new papers on your topic? You have written a PhD on the subject, which enabled you to become familiar with all …

What became of Information Scientists?

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I started fondly reminiscing (as one does) as I listened to Martin White and Sandra Ward last week at this year’s UKeiG’s annual conference, talking about their collaboration on a history of the Institution for Information Science (IIS), until I thought: …

Discovering content in academic libraries

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When you use an academic library catalogue, what are you actually searching?

The graphic shows the main search screen of Cambridge University Library, called iDiscover (actually powered by Primo). The user is presented with, as you might expect, a simple search …

Evaluating recommender systems for academics

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Amazon’s “frequently bought together” tool doesn’t inspire confidence: here Amazon recommends The Handmaid’s Tale and A Streetcar named Desire for anyone buying Hamlet.

Recommender systems are the El Dorado of the 21st century. Retailers, manufacturers, content aggregators such as Netflix and …

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