Shorter Content Means Death for Scientific Articles
December 26, 2016
The digital age is a culture that subsists on digesting quick bits of information before moving onto the next. Scientific journals are hardly the herald of popular trends, but in order to maintain relevancy with audiences the journals are pushing for shorter articles. The shorter articles, however, presents a problem for the authors says Ars Technica in the, “Scientific Publishers Are Killing Research Papers.”
Shorter articles are also pushed because scientific journals have limited pages to print. The journals are also pressured to include results and conclusions over methods to keep the articles short. The methods, in fact, are usually published in another publication labeled supplementary information:
Supplementary information doesn’t come in the print version of journals, so good luck understanding a paper if you like reading the hard copy. Neither is it attached to the paper if you download it for reading later—supplementary information is typically a separate download, sometimes much larger than the paper itself, and often paywalled. So if you want to download a study’s methods, you have to be on a campus with access to the journal, use your institutional proxy, or jump through whatever hoops are required.
The lack of methodical information can hurt researchers who rely on the extra facts to see if it is relevant to their own work. The shortened articles also reference the supplementary materials and without them it can be hard to understand the published results. The shorter scientific articles may be better for general interest, but if they lack significant information than how can general audiences understand them?
In short, the supplementary material should be included online and should be easily accessed.
Whitney Grace, December 26, 2016
Thunderstone Gets an Upgrade
September 1, 2016
Pokémon Go is the latest mobile gaming craze and all of the players want to have a Pikachu as their main Pokémon. Eventually players will evolve their Pikachu into the more powerful Raichu using candy and stardust, but old school Pokémon gamers know that the true way to evolve a Pikachu is with a Thunderstone. The hardest part of evolving a Pikachu, however, was finding the actual Thunderstone. Compulsive searchers have their own difficulties trying to find their information and other related content in their systems. There is a software search solution coincidentally named Thunderstone and it recently went through an upgrade: “Thunderstone Releases Version 16.”
Thunderstone’s newest release includes updates that improve search quality across the board: intranets, aggregators, and public facing Web sites. There also are more authorization options for better security, including a central authentication service and negotiate Kerberos option. Perhaps the biggest upgrade is the following:
Simplified crawl configuration
- Sitemaps allowing easier crawling of sites where URLs are not easily determined from a crawl.
- XML/XSL site support by applying stylesheets to sites that deliver content via XML and XSL instead of HTML; the searchable text is better identified.
- Proxy Auto-config (PAC) file support which makes it easier to index and crawl enterprises composed of different networks with varying proxy rules: the same config files used by browsers may now be used at crawl time.
The Ajax crawlable URL scheme from Google is supported, allowing Ajax based dynamic sites that support it to be crawled and indexed more effectively.”
Thunderstone now packs a more powerful punch for search quality and returning results. Now if only finding Cubone could be improved as well.
Whitney Grace, September 1, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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