The reference hierarchy, from simple to advanced understanding
Wikipedia is where we go first to look something up: you use it when you know nothing about a subject. That’s why Google, until recently, always promoted a Wikipedia article to the top …
Who knows about repositories? They are a fundamental part of the scholarly world: pretty much every institution of higher education around the world has a repository. Yet what they are, how they are run, and why they …
John Burns-Murdoch, in the Financial Times, is the latest to make this claim (“Have humans passed peak brain power?”, FT, 14 March 2025). “Evidence is mounting that … the average person’s ability to reason and solve …
The grand surroundings of the British Medical Association for the R2R Conference
This was the tenth Researcher to Reader (R2R) Conference, ably led and chaired by Mark Carden. Why is it different to other events? It includes plenary sessions, lightning talks, …
The R2R workshop on open science created this word cloud rather than a single definition
There are some words and phrases that seem to evade the normal processes of lexicographic assessment: they turn out to have many meanings. One of them …
One of the earliest Scholarcy interfaces, from 2018
The current Scholarcy interface (2025) – quite a change
Phil Gooch, founder of the successful startup Scholarcy, was the highlight of the first-ever AI, Publishing and EdTech Meetup (London, February 2025). Each …
The Google Search home screen: is this where academics start their research?
Any academic study that looks at institutional repositories is welcome, so we can get a better idea of how many repositories there are, how they function in different countries, …
Differences between search engines and a genAI interface – from the Fernandes and Blomley presentation
The UKSG Forum (Birmingham, 5 December 2024) provided some remarkably informative sessions about AI, from the perspective from the library, as well as from researchers. As …
