You, like a lot of librarians, may have received 2-10 copies of an email from one of the large library vendor saying that they were introducing a new product that would integrate dissertations, ebooks, and articles for the first time. Beyond the annoyance of the multiple e-mails and the suspicion that they're trying to make us pay for something they...

Here's the situation. My larger place of work's electronic resources folks are processing renewals when one digital library comes back and says: your normal increase would be 3% but since your usage increased 24% since last year, it's a 6% increase. Ladies and gentlemen: we do not have an extra 3% to give them, nor did we agree to a usage based subscription...

Quick off-topic comment - if you'd like to support Scientopia, you can find a button on my right hand sidebar to do so.

Photo by Janko Ferlič on Unsplash My normal area to do information analysis and bibliometrics is technology - not even really science, but technology. Current project I'm obsessing on (it's actually really cool and interesting and fun) spans political science, history, philosophy, and even some sociology and criminal justice. So I played all my reindeer...

Some time ago, I posted about using Microsoft Academic to fill in missing data from other searches. Jamie and I were going to do a package to wrap the API, but bureaucracy more or less killed our enthusiasm (well, not his, that would be impossible). Here I am obsessing over a really, really cool bibliometrics project, and have lots of citations missing...

Google Scholar by now is the big player in free places to search across the literature. There are some oldies that are more specific in coverage: CiteSeer, DBLP, etc. And of course big government specialty: PubMed, Eric, TRID... But now there are lots of other choices, which is mostly a good thing: Microsoft Academic is back being actively developed....