bangersandmash

No posts lately because I’ve been stuck in a rathole while trying to work through a possibly insane idea that I’ve been toying with. Hopefully it will lead to a fuller post, but in short I’m messing around with ways to use citation information to help people clarify their dreaded “I’m looking for information on the impact of x on y” (where x usually equals globalization and y equals either a non-Enlgish speaking, non G-7 country or women.)

Who knows how it will work out. Results have been limited so far, but I have had some success in taking topical keywords and terms from statistical agencies and producing a list of articles that identify and analyze trends by working with hard data. Unfortunately, at the moment the number of databases that this works with is exactly one (Scopus) and the list of terms from statistical agencies required to get reasonable results is approaching 20. This may be more useful in theory than in practice.

Having said that, it really would be nice if there were more databases and search engines out there where one could specify that the search terms should be found in the references list. Also it would be nice if Scopus wasn’t so stingy in their application of proximity searching. Why, for the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (yay! two year old meme!) can’t I search for:

(census OR statistics) w/10 Canada

The answer is because Scopus doesn’t allow the use of OR when proximity searching. Which makes kittens cry.