copy-catism, the 2nd

…clicking through the Freelance Translators – Interpreters network group on linkedin.com, i found an interesting post about Google Translate and the underlying Terms of Service: ” ‘By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.’ (…) In human language that means that by uploading any content to any one of Google’s services, including Gmail, Docs, and Translate, we allow Google unlimited use of our content and give up all rights to the privacy of information.” (-> cited from http://aqtext.com/blog/google-translate/; June 1st, 2011.)

This information is not only valuable for translators who deal with confidential customer information. I know researchers who translate entire scientific papers or articles from their mother tongue into English with Google Translate. Although Google seems to use the submitted text material mainly for “enhancing” their services and data mining issues, researchers who have agreed to an NDA with their research institute or faculty or who would never talk about sensitive, confidential results before an article gets officially published, should think twice before using Google’s “services”.

Thinking about this a little longer, these TOS also shine a different light on collaboratively writing articles using Google Docs. Just as a reminder: “… you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit.”

-> The perpetual license to publish my original ideas and research findings without referencing. I don’t like that. At all.

*auweia*, as the Germans use to say…

academic search engine optimization

We strive for being cited. We want to occupy the “references” sections of the scientific world. Google Scholar’s hit list is our red carpet.
However, many scientists spent too little time thinking about how to improve their rankings on search engine hit lists like Google Scholar. blog.scholarz.net even says papers which are not listed on Google Scholars do simply not exist for many researchers and will therefore never receive much attention. In their paper Academic Search Engine Optimization (ASEO): Optimizing Scholarly Literature for Google Scholar and Co., Jöran Beel, Bela Gipp, and Erik Wilde show how a scientific paper may be optimized for academic and regular search engines.
Very interesting is the discussion the authors include as their section 4 of the paper where they cite two reviewers expressing a critical attitude towards what the authors call “Academic Search Engine Optimization” (ASEO):

I’m not a big fan of this area of research […]. I know it’s in the call for papers, but I think that’s a mistake.

And:

[This] paper seems to encourage scientific paper authors to learn Google scholar’s ranking method and write papers accordingly to boost ranking [which is not] acceptable to scientific communities which are supposed to advocate true technical quality/impact instead of ranking.

In my opinion, being interested in how (academic) search engines function and how scientific papers are indexed and, of course, responding to these… well… circumstances of the scientific citing business is just natural.
Moreover, the trouble is homemade: If scientists (that means: we) limit their (our) literature research basis to Google Scholar’s hit lists and do not set great store of in-depth research, digging, detective work, and being creative in finding the right papers to substantiate their own scientific findings and ideas they cut off their own noses to spite their faces. Its almost the same phenomenon as we know it from the “old” citing business: The more famous the author you cite is, the better is your citation and the scientific work supposed to be. So, in the course of time, more and more people cite less and less authors while the number of the citations taken from their papers keeps growing. And the higher the number of citations is, the more they will be cited.

Still, little wonders oftentimes hide in secret spaces… maybe on your trusted library’s dusty shelves, maybe in a references section of an unbeknown scientist’s paper, or even ranked 10’034th on Google Scholar’s hit list.