Computing Reviews News

New: An Easier Way to Link to Reviews

We've released a very easy linking scheme for Computing Reviews that allows you to link to a review (if one exists) using the item's ISBN or DOI number. You can set this up for a variety of applications or just to provide easy links from your site. Let us know how you use it!

To link to the review of a book, simply construct a URL using the ISBN of the book, like this:

http://www.reviews.com/isbn/0521707412

To link to the review of a journal or conference proceedings article, construct the URL using the DOI of the article, like this:

http://www.reviews.com/doi/10.1145/1357054.1357336

If we have a review of the item, our system will find it based on the ISBN or DOI and redirect you to the review page. Subscribers with IP-based access will have the review page display automatically; otherwise, you'll need to use your login details to access the review.

If we don't have a review of the book or journal article, you'll be redirected to the Computing Reviews homepage.

That's it. We hope that database providers will be able to take advantage of this simple linking scheme to provide additional links within their content to our reviews.

New Feature: Custom Full Text Button

Computing Reviews can now use your custom button when linking to your link resolver via OpenURL. If you have already provided a base URL you only need to send us the button or a link to where we can find it on your public website.

If you are not yet using the custom OpenURL link please send both your button and your base URL.

Here’s how it will look:

Your button replaces our Full Text button on the review page. Clicking on that button will send the user to your link resolver system using the base URL you provide.

Tips:

• The default CR Full Text button is 60 x 20 pixels. We have no size restrictions for your button but ask that you provide something of a similar size to avoid changing the page dimensions too much.

• We can only use a custom image (.gif, .jpg, or .png) – we cannot add any custom text.

Please send your image file or image URL to: [email protected]

Journal Title Alerting for Reviewers

We want our reviews to match the fast of pace of publishing today and this is always a challenge (publishing isn't getting any slower!). Our editorial group does a great deal of work trying to match up new articles and books with reviewers as fast as we learn about them and I think our reviewers would say that we aren't shy about prodding them to get their review drafts in to us quickly.

The module that our reviewers access to write and submit their reviews also allows them to self-assign items they want to review and self-assignments are a critical part of the reviewer-to-item match. When you're reading a review, if you see "Reviewer Selected" in the Recommendations box to the top right of the page you know that the reviewer has self-assigned that item.

To further encourage reviewer self-assignment we use alerting. Most commonly, reviewers get their alerts by matches to the CCS profile; but we're hoping to encourage more Journal Title Alerting and browsing for articles to make that critical match while the articles are still hot off the presses (or the pixels are smoking if they're published online first). We're going to be sending out a tip sheet to all reviewers about this feature but I wanted to also promote it here for any that might be reading. If you'd like a PDF of the tip sheet, please contact Annette at [email protected] and she'll send it along to you.

RSS feeds for CR reviews in testing

We're testing out RSS feeds for our reviews. The feeds provide you a partial review (the same text that appears on the home page). To read the review, you need to click the review title and login, or be validated by your institutional subscription.

The feed is available at: http://www.reviews.com/tasks/rssfeed.cfm

Update: Please use the link for the Feedburner feed - http://feeds.feedburner.com/ReviewscomFeaturedReviews

I can see a few updates and changes I want to make to the content of the feed, including adding the reviewer's name as the author of the "post" but I still think they're very much worth adding to your reader if you're a CR regular (or hey, if you're a casual reader, too! Maybe we can convert you.). Let us know via the comments what you think (and yes, we plan to make alternate versions available - we're experimenting with what ColdFusion can output). I get my feeds via NewsGator and MyYahoo! and both are displaying the feed now.

We also want to integrate Hot Topics into the feed but I'm not sure if they should be within the main feed or as a feed of their own as they're not published as frequently or regularly.

One additional caveat is that the feed URL may change before we consider the feed a live release (do people even beta feeds? CR isn't a proper blog so I'm taking that as my excuse) so check back here occasionally for an update. I'm looking into putting the feed through Feedburner.com, which is also where the feed for this blog is, to track usage stats.

Update: I spoke too soon! We made the changes necessary to point the feed through Feedburner, so please use the updated link above.