Tony ([info]quikchange) wrote,
@ 2005-09-12 21:25:00
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Current mood: optimistic
Current music:Beethoven - Adagio Molto E Cantabile
Entry tags:academics, culture, philosophy, technology

The old fogeys are going down
When I was asked to write research papers at UW, most of my profs were adamant about us not relying upon the Net for our research; some went so far as to point out that the goood stuff is only to be found in obscure journals with no online presence. This baffles me. Do these journals revel in their exclusivity? If not, why do they not publish online? The world is changing. These days, if you're not in Google, you don't exist.


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___cai
2005-09-13 01:30 am UTC (link)
tony! i didn't get to say goodbye, but now i am doing so with a sticky 'o' key some 100 km away. i wish you the best of luck in california and i can't wait to hear about it! :)

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[info]quikchange
2005-09-13 11:10 am UTC (link)
Well, at least we had a lovely late-night chat :)

I'll be sure to write about my adventures down South.

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[info]andytheace
2005-09-13 04:12 am UTC (link)
that's because profs are old school.

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[info]victory_is_me
2005-09-13 06:46 am UTC (link)
Clarification question: No online presence at all, or no free online presence?

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[info]quikchange
2005-09-13 11:08 am UTC (link)
That's a good question. The key is a searchable online presence, whether it's free or not. The university does have subscriptions to almost every journal with an online presence that would normally have cost me money so that's not a problem. The problem is that some have no presence and others with content online cannot be indexed by Google, making them difficult to search because their own search engines (when they offer any) tend to suck by comparison. What they ought to do is allow the Google spiders a "free subscription" but prevent their content from being cached.

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[info]kinthelt
2005-09-13 01:10 pm UTC (link)
Do I have to call your bullshit?

It's called using a journal index. Try this one, it's a good one. If the university doesn't have a subscription to the index, a username/password box will pop up. Usually this can be avoided by using the site via the University's computers or going through a portal site.

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[info]quikchange
2005-09-13 01:19 pm UTC (link)
It doesn't let you search the content like Google does.

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[info]kinthelt
2005-09-13 01:24 pm UTC (link)
Yes it does.

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[info]enigmaticdan
2005-09-13 02:29 pm UTC (link)
Isn't Google Scholar the Google tool for this problem?

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[info]quikchange
2005-09-13 03:32 pm UTC (link)
Hmm... good point. But not all journals are indexed by it (yet).

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[info]kinthelt
2005-09-14 03:48 am UTC (link)
As I mentioned earlier, there are online journal indexes. You can search for author, title, keyword in abstract, or keyword in body, etc. And they are not just indexes for one or two particular journals, they cover a large cross-section of reputable journals.

Speaking from experience, Google Scholar really isn't that good. The inability to filter what you are searching for (author, title, journal, etc) is a huge minus. As is its lack of displaying the abstract before following the link to load the entire article.

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