New scholar search engine

September 30, 2020

New scholar search engine

Internet Archive recently announced an alpha version of their new scholar search engine: Internet Archive Scholar
https://scholar-qa.archive.org/

According to the website:

"This fulltext search index includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals though the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web"

Preserving Open Access Journals
Although a growing number of research is freely available on the internet (= open access), part of these publications will disappear. Recent studies have shown that between the years 2000 and 2019 a least 176 open access journals are no longer available online. Half of these are from social sciences and humanities. Why are they no longer available? There are a number of reasons, for instance, a publisher can no longer afford the costs to maintain the website of a journal or technological errors with server updates.

With their Wayback Machine the Internet Archive has for the last twenty years preserved online websites, texts, audio and images. They also scan paper journals and microfilms content. In this way they preserve journals online. By partnering with Cloudfare Always Online they have made their collections of scholarly publications searchable.

Good addition (not a replacement) to Google Scholar
What are the findings. In short Internet Archive Scholar offers:

Basic search option (Boolean operators and wildcards can be added in your search)
Refine the results list to:

Release day
Resource type (papers, reports, datasets)
Availability (full text, microfilm, open access, metadata)
Sort order (relevance (how this is done is not clear), recent first, oldest first)

Although Internet Archive Scholar shows errors in use and very basic search options (it is an alpha version!), it also contains interesting features: the results include datasets, text mining is possible and the result list show an image of the found journal/article. Although quite a number of articles in popular journals are also included, it is for humanities a good addition for research, besides Google Scholar. The latter recently updated their scholar browser button