The mysterious journal "No title" has been a pretty regular feature of the SFX usage statistics since I started dumping the journal title use into spreadsheets. You can see it bob around in the top 20 titles used in the spreadsheet TopJournals0708.xls. Here's a sample image from December 2007:
(click image for full-size)
Thanks to the smart people on the SFX User Group discussion list, I've finally figured out what the heck causes "No title" to appear month after month. Ready?
You may recall that the Get It menu is generated from many sources, including the Get It button, Citation Linker, and the E-Journals list. Any time someone generates a Get It menu, they are also generating an OpenURL. In order for SFX to record that a journal title is used, the OpenURL must contain either the journal's ISSN or title. Moreover, the journal title must appear in a specific field in the OpenURL - JTITLE. An OpenURL can contain several types of title, but JTITLE is the only field that legitimately contains journal titles. With no ISSN or JTITLE in an OpenURL, SFX counts the use to a generic "No title" entity.
So why would an OpenURL not contain ISSN or JTITLE? Let me count the ways...
First, despite our best efforts, Get It's interfaces aren't always intuitive for our users (we're working on that). Take the Citation Linker. According to a December 2007 report I pulled out of SFX, Citation Linker is a major source of "No title" usage. Out of 153 OpenURLs from Citation Linker that resulted in no full-text service, nearly half (74) contained no JTITLE or ISSN. So what did they contain? Article titles, mostly. Book titles in the Article title field. Author, volume, issue, page number. Incorrect journal titles. In short, everything but JTITLE or ISSN.
Citation Linker isn't the only source of "No title" usage. Some of our information providers get away with sloppy OpenURL compliance, particularly in their older interfaces. According to the same December 2007 SFX report I referenced above, our Silver Platter databases are particularly egregious offenders - Ageline, AGRICOLA, and GeoRef, to name a few. The interface, WebSPIRS, does a terrible job of marking up citation metadata so that Get It can locate it. I didn't count instances of "No Title" for Silver Platter, but the visual impression was pretty appalling.
I'll be happy to share this SFX report with you - please contact me directly as it's rather large. Otherwise, the next time you view SFX title usage you'll know the reason behind those "No title" numbers.
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