Open J-Gate: Search Tips and Comparison with DOAJ

You have probably used Informatics India directory Open J-Gate (the website is not working at the moment) to find open access articles and journals.

However, in case you didn't know it (b/se DOAJ search options are not that many), search tips (e.g. operators, truncation) about using the database can optimize your results. You can learn how by reading some of J-Gate Newsletter search tip monthly articles from June 2011 onwards - just browse the J-Gate Newsletter archive. 



In the monthly issues of the newsletter, you will see the following sections: 

• Search tips;
  


• Editor's Desk and Researcher's Corner articles - other tips and advice to researchers and students;


• News regarding the directory;


• Open access in general - e.g. when a journal offers temporary free access to its articles;


• Changes in journals and learned societies;


• Upcoming events in the field of librarianship.

An article (the link is currently broken) published on J-Gate Newsletter compares Open J-Gate with DOAJ  - the other major directory of open access journals. While the India-based Open J-Gate is the world's largest directory of OA articles in English (at least the abstract is in En), Sweden-based DOAJ lists articles in other languages as well.

As of November 2011 Open J-Gate has indexed 4,219,554 articles vs. 658,219 for DOAJ. At the same time,  around 5,300 journals are common for both. DOAJ hosts a bigger number a of peer-reviewed journals - 7,253 vs. 6,358 for Open J-Gate. The latter, however, indexes preofessional and trade journals in addition to the academc ones.

The article notes that Open J-Gate has more sophisticated search options, and that it obtained funding only by Informatics India while DOAJ has been funded by a number of sources, among which SPARC, OSI, EBSCO and INASP.