How is the “Journal” filter in OneSearch populated?
When you click on the “Journal” facet after doing a search, it almost always displays about 20 journal titles. However, in a search with thousands of results, you are obviously retrieving many more journals than that. And it doesn’t look like it’s the top 20 journals, either, because some of the hits for the same title are quite low. So what’s going on?
Most facets are created dynamically from search results. The 200 top-ranked records in a search result are used to create the list of facet values which will display in the “Expand My Results” section. All hits in the search results for those values are counted and the number is displayed in parentheses to the right of the facet value. So, really, it is not the 20 most common journals in the result, it is (at least in theory) the 20 most relevant journals.
Furthermore, the “Journal” facet includes newspaper titles, too, since it’s really a category consisting of serials. The resource type “Newspaper Articles,” on the other hand, refers to just articles within newspapers and “Articles” refers to articles in journals and other periodicals. Material types depend on the way the content is cataloged, whether it is by local catalogers (in the CUNY Catalog and CUNY Academic Works) or by the vendor (in the Primo Central Index).
Restricted search collections in OneSearch
The following list of vendors restricts access to their collections (even to just the metadata, the information that is displayed in the search results) unless the user is on-campus or signed into OneSearch:
- ProQuest
- Scopus
- Web of Science
- ArtStor
- MLA
- Bureau of National Affairs (BNA)
- RMIT Publishing
- American Geoscience Institute
- Henrietta Szold Institute
- Index to Hebrew Periodicals
For the average user of OneSearch, this means that results from these vendors will not show up in his/her searches unless the user is on campus or signed into OneSearch. To circumvent this problem, the Office of Library Services has included a message at the top of the results list to prompt users to sign in if they are not already logged in or if they’re visiting from a non-campus-affiliated IP address:
(For more information about this prompt, please see the entry we wrote when we implemented this feature in July 2015: “Off campus?” prompt now appears only off-campus.)
Depending on the search, the user can expect to see a handful of extra results or thousands of additional records for his/her query! For this reason, everyone is encouraged to sign into OneSearch to get all available results.
Popular OneSearch Searches: February 2016
The following is a list of the top OneSearch search term at each campus (and the CUNY-wide OneSearch instance) between 02/01/2016 and 02/29/2016, organized by the number of times the query had been searched at that library:
- ellis island (205)
- interpersonal spacing (136)
- washington state (120)
- phillips “urban social work” (119)
- “code switching” (78)
- “social media” (76)
- french revolution (75)
- wilderness therapy (60)
- the industrial diet (55)
- world music global journey (52)
- road to brown (48)
- global warming (47)
- culture and personality (36)
- climate change (25)
- willowbrook state school (25)
- octavia butler (21)
- beginning algebra tobey (20)
- lipkind, william (17)
- postpartum depression (12)
- black panthers huey newton (8)
- the death and life of the great american school system (8)
- the functional art (5)
When we performed the top search in that library’s instance of OneSearch, we found some great photos, including this one from the Library of Congress:
Source: Library of Congress
If you haven’t explored all that OneSearch has to offer, what are you waiting for!?
