Sunday, December 16, 2012

Japanese DOAJ


The Japan Science and Technology Agency (www.jst.go.jp) is a government agency tasked with encouraging innovation in science and technology in Japan.

Recognizing the importance of access to electronic journals one of their projects is J-STAGE (www.jstage.jst.go.jp) a searchable data base of open access journals.  Its purpose is to support the computerizing of bulletins of academic societies, journals and then make Japanese science and technology information easily accessible to Japanese and non-Japanese. 

Open access refers to electronic journals, books, conference proceedings, etc. that can be accessed without any requirement beyond registering.  J-STAGE requires registration.   
 
As of December 16th S-TAGE contained 1591 journals or 2,451,624 full text articles.  The advanced search allows one to search by keyword, article title, full text, journal or subject area.  One can select if one wants the articles in Japanese or English, conference proceedings or journals and most important select only the peer reviewed journals.  Most college assignments require peer reviewed articles.  

Earlier reviews suggest S-TAGE was mostly medical journals but I found a high percentage of electronic and materials science journals.  I ran three tests. 

Searching “brain tumor” as full text, peer reviewed journals only, I found 28 articles in three journals. 

Searching “nano-technology” got eight articles from two journals. 

Searching “rice” limited to the humanities and social sciences area got 31 articles but all in one journal.   

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