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eJournal browsing

By catdynamics on October 9, 2008.

so the Astrophysical Journal, Letters has gone online/print-on-demand
and I kinda miss it, though I don't think I've actually picked up a printed copy for years

the one thing us old fogeys keep reminiscing about, is how the old paper journals were nice for browsing.
We'd wonder down to the library or reading room, and actually pick up the new journal and browse to the articles.

The nice thing about that, is that you see the other articles in the issue, or some of the adjacent ones anyway. Those may be interesting, surprising and informative in a serendipitous sort of way.
Can't do that if you just go straight to the online article.

But, there is a solution to that, which is already used by all the better blogs.
If you go straight to a post, the header will show the post before and after.
The online journals should do that, when you go directly to a particular article, there should be a pointer to the "before" and "after" articles with direct links for browsing.
Just in case they are interesting.
Should be trivial to implement, I am assuming there are "adjacent" articles, based on the need to maintain a virtual pagination index.

For extra excitement, have customizable pointers, maybe defaulting to the adjacent articles in page space, but offering random pointers, or closest-new-in-subject articles, or some semi-deterministic+random algorithm for pseudo-browsing.

I want this.

Tags
Academia

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I must admit that it's much more satisfying to see your own article in the print edition rather than the PDF. I do have ApJ(L) sent me an email with the table of contents (eTOC) for each volume, though. Sometimes it saves me from missing something on arXiv, albeit 9 months late.

I must admit that it's much more satisfying to see your own article in the print edition rather than the PDF. I do have ApJ(L) sent me an email with the table of contents (eTOC) for each volume, though. Sometimes it saves me from missing something on arXiv, albeit 9 months late.

I remember a CD-ROM encyclopædia from the early 1990s (Compton's, I think) which showed an alphabetical scroll of articles when you looked up a topic by name. Much as with a paper encyclopædia, you could get lost in poking through the stuff alphabetically close to what you were ostensibly looking for.