Thinking about Digital Publishing

Some implications of "digital" for scholarly writing and publishing

The ISKO-UK Conference (Glasgow, July 2023)

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The wonderful logo of ISKO, suggesting a Enlightenment masonic-like capturing of all knowledge in a harmonious whole

Knowledge Organization! A mention of the subject leaves the average person scratching their heads. What exactly is it? In truth, attending a conference on …

The Search Solutions 2023 Conference

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The legendary “Liddell and Scott” Greek-English Lexicon of 1842, for many years the standard way to of searching for ancient Greek words. Search has got simpler since then!

I’m looking forward to Search Solutions 2023 (Wednesday 22 November, at the BCS …

Hype in scholarly writing

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The famous 1954 paper showing the causative link between smoking and lung cancer

Ken Hyland wrote an interesting post (16 May 2023) on the appropriately named LSE Impact Blog, with the melodramatic title “Crucial! New! Essential! – The rise of hype …

Google: Mind finally united with Brain

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Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash

The news this week that Google is merging its two AI initiatives, Deep Mind, and Google Brain caused a stir, but commentators have struggled to interpret this development consistently. According to the Financial Times (““Deep …

Reading on screen is addling our brains

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Academic studies of reading appear to be influenced by romantic ideas about how we read print (Corot, Woman reading in the country, around 1868-70, Metropolitan Museum)

Where did this idea come from, and is it valid? It seems to me an …

UKSG 2023: the Glasgow experience

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The barn-like SEC, where UKSG was held

Now that the UKSG annual conference has got back to something like normality following the pandemic years, it seems a good moment to explore some fundamental questions. What is UKSG for?

You could say, …

Information Retrieval: from theory to practice

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The European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) seems to have emerged from the pandemic stronger than ever. This year, in Dublin, saw the highest number of attendees ever, I’m told, at over 380 in-person and virtual attendees. I’m not a computing …

How to find seminal papers

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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 …

Making reviews more open

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The first issue of French Studies (1947). From the start, this journal contained reviews – there were 15 reviews in this issue.

Sjang ten Hagen writes (in the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog) about “the apparent role of book reviewing …

Where should I search?

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Subject coverage of some of the collections evaluated. “GSC”, Google Scholar, has the largest collection, fairly evenly spread across subjects. Others, such as PubMed (PMD), are heavily focused on medical subjects.

Choosing where to search is a central part of the …

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