I’m still just kicking the tires of OJS 3.0.2 and am playing with the search filters a wee bit. I missed the old 2.4.x "Browse By’ block, but discovered it is actually pretty easy to write a basic block plugin. Doing that I discovered that links like ./search/authors still sort of works, but ./search/titles does not.
So, I guess I have a couple questions;
Is there an intention to add the titles search filter/listing back into OJS 3.x?
Was it intended that the authors search filter/listing still work, or was that just lucky?
Are the differences I’m going to point out below in the authors filter a bug in OJS 2.x or 3.x?
So, here are the search/authors pages of a 2.x site and a 3.0.2 site with the same data. The 3.x site has 176 results. The 2.x 150. I understand why there are many of the duplicates. I believe all these entire were done with the QuickSubmit plugin, and people are inconsistent in how their names are entered. That doesn’t explain all of it though. Look at the name Aberdeen, Trudie and you’ll see what I mean. Also, in the 3.x list, announcement titles are showing up as author’s names. These do not display at all in the 2.x list, which seems correct to me.
The “search by authors” tool never worked well – as you’ve noted, the same author with slightly different biographical information (e.g. affiliation) will show up twice. And at best, that page would only show results from the current OJS installation, which is awfully arbitrary for a scholar’s purposes. We prefer to lean on third-party resources like ORCiD to provide interconnectivity like this. If you enter ORCiDs along with your author information, then where the article is presented you should see a link back to each author’s ORCiD public profile. I would argue that this serves users much better than the old browse tool, which is due for removal rather than repair.
As for “browse by authors”, I don’t have a strong opinion – but I do wonder what the reader motivation is for having this. I wonder whether readers wouldn’t be better served by using indexes like Google Scholar etc. That said, this is a less complicated feature and would be relatively easy to maintain (and with fewer inherent flaws than the “by author” listing).
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
I think as to motivation for the “browse by authors”, many journals are very specific on topic with the work of very specialized authors. I can easily imagine a scenario when you are reading an issue, discover an author you are interested in, and would like a look at other articles by said author published by the same journal. I think browse by authors would be one way of doing that. It would also be nice if you could click on an authors name in an article summary view, and get returned a list of other articles in the journal from that author. A final use I can think of for “browse by authors” is just for the curious reader of a journal who wants a quick overview of all authors published in the journal.
We would like to display into 2 different pages all the articles (as it was in OJS2 with the page: {url page=“search” op=“titles”} and an other page we have created to have recent articles {url page=“search” op=“recents”}
We also would like to have like in OJS2 in the search page, Additional Search Options like asked also @ceciroz in this forum.
Any search phrase used in the search box will automatically return matches with authors, title and abstract. You can further restrict results by Author using the By Author option. We have no Full Text data so couldn’t provide any matches with that. From/Until are available with the Published After/Publlished Before options. The other metadata is not used consistently or widely by OJS 3 adopters, and isn’t indexed for efficient searches, so we can’t really provide searching by that data either.
I don’t think we’re opposed to adding any of this, but we haven’t had strong requests for it so it’s not really a priority.
the possibility to browse by authors is for us very important. Will the the url “…/search/authors” work in the future as well? If so, I could write my own plugin for this function.
This is in our long-term plans, but I wouldn’t expect it very soon. I’d encourage you to consider writing your own plugin for this if you need it urgently.
Do you still intend to create such a plugin for OJS 3? For some of our journals author browsing (as was possible in OJS 2) is important so we might be interested in re-using a plugin if possible.
I am sorry for the late answer, but I was on vacation until yesterday.
We still plan to do a very simple plugin as a temporary solution, but my colleague from the IT department will not work on this for the next two months.
The easiest and quickest solution would be to create a block with the custom block plugin and insert a link to the author’s index I mentiuoned above (for example: http://www.yourdomain.com/ojs/index.php/yourjournal/search/authors)
Hi UBWolf,
Thanks a lot. We will try to implement the “easiest and quickest solution”, and hopefully URLs ending “…/search/authors” will continue to work.
Regards,
Gerwin
I’m afraid I’m not that familiar with the search functionality. But if it does work now, it may be a holdover from previous code and I wouldn’t count on it working correctly or consistently – or it even being there in future versions.
Sorry, I know that’s probably not what you want to hear but we haven’t settled on a clear direction for improving the search at this time. I know that one of our partners is working on revamping the Lucene plugin for searching, which may offer a more robust feature-set.