Librarians are at best ambivalent about Google, but it's hard to deny they come up with really interesting and useful tools.

In this blog post, which was co-written with Bianca Kramer (Utrecht University Library) and Ludo Waltman (CWTS, Leiden University), we discuss the value of openly available abstracts.

It's a cliche to say that the volume of scientific literature produced is increasing at a rate beyond which researchers can keep up.

Microsoft Academic (first relaunched in 2016) is one of the biggest index of academic content next to Google Scholar.

One thing the COVID-19 crisis has put a spotlight on is how well our scientific publishing system works.

Boolean query in 2D Search for Lens.org (sneak peak) In a fairly popular  2014 blog post entitled "Why Nested Boolean search statements may not work as well as they did", I set out the case for why for the majority of users, doing overly complicated nested boolean is unlikely to be of much additional value. Argument rested on two main arguments.

How is everybody? As I write this, we are in day 9 of our "circuit breaker" (which is very like a soft lockdown) here in Singapore. As an introvert and being pretty adept on the use of technology for communicating, I would have thought that this would be a dream for me. Don't get me wrong. I appreciate the timing of the "circuit breaker" which fortuitously came into effect just after my paternal leave ran out and

While I have been adjusting to the latest change in my personal life, the world has been grappling with the impact of COVID-19. Updated : 30th April 2020

Back in Oct 2018 (I know because I searched my email), I was helping some third party test a browser extension that would provide links to free full text (somewhat akin to Unpaywall) and I came across this curious Dark Grey box with the words "PDF" at the side of a journal article.

With the rise of open access journals and in particularly the business model involving APCs (Article Processing Charges) where authors pay a fee upfront to make their papersopen access, we are now understandably worried about authors publishing in "potentially predatory journals", where publishers have the incentive to charge a fee and not do proper vetting before publishing the paper.

1. Dimensions (includng free) now includes Research Datasets 2. Google dataset search comes out of beta 3. Datacite adds citation display showing links between articles and datasets The release, storage, management,  and discovery of Research Datasets is an area that has been advancing in the last few years. Here are three new updates that caught my eye in the last few months.