"Clickbait" corrupting scholarship

The Tax Prof Blog posts and quotes from a recent article in Inside Higher Education, which says that "academe has been “hacked” by scholars and journals looking to up their citation and impact figures." The problem has received attention because of the recent furor over an article called "The Case for Colonialism" published in the Third World Quarterly. The article has been criticized as being "a thrice-rejected piece that failed on basic scholarly standards of intellectual rigor, accuracy or integrity ” and some critics claim that the only reason it was published was as "clickbait" to raise the profile of the journal. The paper achieved a higher Altmetric Attention Score than any other paper published in the journal.

Hollywood versions of true crime

The ABA Journal has an interesting article about how Hollywood portrays true crime stories in films. The article discusses the movie version of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, about the 1959 murder of an entire family in Kansas by two men; it says "Critics have suggested Capote took a few creative licenses with certain scenes and conversations for dramatic impact as well: a 1988 biography concedes that at least one of the scenes was Capote’s own creation... there’s evidence that Capote arranged scenes and added fiction to what he claimed was a factually accurate account."

CASA from Google Scholar and HeinOnline

The HeinOnline blog reports that Hein has expanded its existing relationship with Google Scholar (Google Scholar provides links to articles in HeinOnline when available). Now off-campus users can access HeinOnline articles seamlessly, without having to log in through a proxy server. This service, developed by Google Scholar, is called Campus-Activated Subscriber Access (CASA). The blurb from Google says that " With CASA, a researcher can start a literature survey on campus and resume where she left off once she is home, or travelling, with no hoops to jump through. Her subscribed collections are highlighted in Google Scholar searches and she is able to access articles in exactly the same way as on campus.”
The blogpost points out that with CASA, subscribing libraries are still abot to comply with license agreement terms and copyright laws, and material accessed via CASA is correctly attributed to the subscribing institution, so usage statistics remain accurate. One caveat is that Users must access HeinOnline on-campus at least every 30 days to maintain off-campus access.

Historical Congressional Record for the 1920s now available from GPO

The Government Printing Office (GPO) has announced that the GPO, in partnership with the Library of Congress, has uploaded the digitized Congressional Record from 1921 - 1930 to GPO's govinfo website. This release covers the debates and proceedings of the 67th through the 71st Congresses and the presidential terms of Wilson (final 2 years), Harding, Coolidge and Hoover (first 2 years). It includes Congressional debates of important historical topics, such as the lengthy debate about the Immigration Act of 1924. GPO points out that other topics covered include Prohibition, the Teapot Dome Scandal, The Dawes Plan for WWI reparations, and The Stock Market Crash of 1929.

A new look for the Bloomberg BNA website

Bloomberg BNA has announced that on Thursday, September 28, the BNA.com website will be updated. The website will have a new look and feel, which will slightly change the way you sign into your Bloomberg BNA and Bloomberg Law products. On the new home page, click on the green “Sign In” button at the top right of the page, enter your user name and password, and you should be signed in and able to access Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg BNA.
Here's hoping the transition will be smooth.

Bar Exam results are improving

The blog "Excess of Democracy", written by Pepperdine Law professor Derek Muller, has been following the latest bar exam results closely as they are reported. Last week he reported that bar exam scores this year have rebounded to the highest point since 2013 (note that not all state bar exam results have been reported yet). Today he has a post analyzing these results titled "Why are bar exam scores improving?" In the post he looks at how law schools' strategies for improving their bar pass rates may have affected this year's results. He concludes by saying,

"I wonder if institutions have found better strategies of intervening with at-risk students, or providing more robust bar exam support for at-risk students. Perhaps in the last couple of years, students have been sufficiently scared of failing the bar to study harder or earlier... These are matters that institutions may have the data to examine (or may be in the process of collecting). Regardless, it remains good, albeit still slightly mysterious news--and those in legal education hope that it is the beginning of a continued trend of good news."

Facebook and privacy

Gizmodo has an interesting blogpost about Facebook called "Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, And It Won't Tell Me How." The author says:

"Rebecca Porter and I were strangers, as far as I knew. Facebook , however, thought we might be connected. Her name popped up this summer on my list of “People You May Know,” the social network’s roster of potential new online friends for me. The People You May Know feature is notorious for its uncanny ability to recognize who you associate with in real life. It has mystified and disconcerted Facebook users by showing them an old boss, a one-night-stand, or someone they just ran into on the street.
What makes the results so unsettling is the range of data sources—location information, activity on other apps, facial recognition on photographs—that Facebook has at its disposal to cross-check its users against one another, in the hopes of keeping them more deeply attached to the site. People generally are aware that Facebook is keeping tabs on who they are and how they use the network, but the depth and persistence of that monitoring is hard to grasp. . . . Rebecca Porter, we discovered, is my great aunt, by marriage. She is married to my biological grandfather’s brother; she met him 35 years ago, the year after I was born. Facebook knew my family tree better than I did."

File under creepy.